Luis Gonçalves's Blog, page 6

Time to Market: How your Company Can Keep Launching New Products and Features Ahead of Your Competition

Time to Market: How your Company Can Keep Launching New Products and Features Ahead of Your Competition

Companies like Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft have proven that innovation is the key to greatness. That’s why most businesses put a significant premium on it. However, just coming out with innovative products or new features is not enough. Companies also have to make sure their products and services reach the market in time. After all, it’s a cutthroat world out there and delaying the launch of a product can have serious repercussions, especially since a product’s novelty diminishes quickly.

Since it’s essential for your business to get your innovative new products out to the market before your competitors do, it’s imperative that you learn and understand the idea of Time to Market.

Importance of Time to Market

Time to Market (TTM) refers to the period that a company needs to develop a product and launch it. This duration includes the generation of ideas, designing, developing and testing it, and introducing it to consumers.  The more organised and efficient your business’ product development system is, the more effective you’ll be at scheduling the time to market. This can also help you develop plans on how to release the product at the appropriate time and place.

The concept of Time to Market is also known as Speed to Market (STM). There are several reasons why TTM is the key deciding element on whether a new product or service will become successful. First, the majority of companies invest in innovations, albeit with different levels of importance. Second, putting off developing your improvements or ideas gives your competitors an edge over you. Next, remember that most innovations or product enhancements depend on technology or are enabled by it. Technology changes at a rapid pace and taking the long road with your products could mean that by the time it hits the market, it’s already redundant. Lastly, there’s a small window of opportunity for the optimal pricing of a product, and this window shrinks slowly every day. Once an enhanced product or feature or improved service becomes mainstream, it will no longer provide high returns.

Understanding the Difference Between Resource Efficiency and Flow Efficiency

Resource efficiency or Flow efficiency? Companies have to choose the ideal work system for them in order for their departments to work well and come up with the innovations they need. But to do so, one needs to understand the difference between resource efficiency and flow efficiency.

Resource efficiency is the system wherein the work flows from one employee to the other. This system regards each employee as a specialist, the only person capable of doing a particular job. Every person in a resource efficient company is fully optimised and utilised. However, it also means that whatever task that has to be done or feature to be developed can only be done when the specialist finally gets around to it. This method typically results in a “cost of delay” as employees wait for the other to accomplish their duties first before they can even start on their own tasks.

Flow efficiency focuses on the opposite. Instead of individual employees, this system concentrates on the whole team. This means that every team member is a specialist so even if one member is missing, the work can still continue. This process admittedly tends to be slower because every member has the same skills and degree of expertise. However, this method guarantees that the project will be finished on time.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each method. Resource efficiency is all about optimising the employee’s skills while flow efficiency optimises the features the team is developing. The former method can cause work queues to pile up if the member in charge of the product hits a roadblock or works slowly. Meanwhile, the rest of the members will probably commence working on other features or tasks that they can do. This can lead to multi-tasking and additional stress when the deadline draws near and crucial functions or elements are still unfinished.

The scenario is different with flow efficiency. Because the whole team is on even ground and works together, they also accomplish things together. For instance, one member can work on the UI while another can commence developing automated tests that do not need a fully functioning UI yet. The progress might be slow, but the team will definitely have a sense of accomplishment as the project moves forward slowly and steadily.

3 Advantages of Improving Your Company’s Time to Market

Regardless of whether your company is utilising the flow efficiency or resource efficiency process, improving Time to Market is still the end goal.

The duration of your company’s Time to Market can have a major impact on a product’s success. Businesses and product design departments these days misuse 40% or more of their supplies or resources, which causes delays. The majority of wasted resources is because of inefficiency, like repetitive work, redundant administrative paperwork, unnecessary product features, inferior product roll-outs or poor information management. What makes it worse is that 80% of a company’s data (social media accounts, emails, videos, photos) are complicated and disorganised while the needed tools do not give the appropriate support.

It’s therefore critical for a company to speed up its time to market. Doing so can result in these three advantages:

Economical Managerial Procedures: Creating a steady timeline lets your company’s key team streamline and manage production time and cost as well as develop schedules based on headcount planning and lead time.
Improve Revenue Margin:  Your business will enjoy improved revenue margins as new products and services are released earlier than expected and it meets what the market demands.
Gives You a Leg Up Over Your Competitors: A solid speed to market pace will provide you with a leg over your competitors while providing you with the opportunity to maximise new technology. Your company will also be exposed to more market opportunities and hopefully secure higher market shares.

5 Ways to Accelerate Time to Market

Time to market is undeniably very important to a business. What remains to be done now is to find ways on how you can speed it up. Here are some suggestions:

Mix Business With Technology: One mistake a lot of companies make is to keep their design and innovation bases separate from each other while key departments do not get involved in the design and development process. This slows down TTM and reduces the company’s drive to take risks. Get the different departments involved. Having their own stake in the process will boost time to market.
Select a Clear Revenue Target: Giving your innovation team a clear target – in financial terms – that they have to reach will spur them to try harder to succeed. Innovations are innately connected to the company’s business model so there should be a clear way to measure its success from a financial viewpoint. This will encourage teams to push for a faster TTM.
Make Good Use of Outsourcing Services: You can actually outsource all components of the TTM process aside for some critical areas. For instance, you can tap another company to identify what customers should be targeted, manage promotion channels, and come up with price points. Create a mutually beneficial ecosystem with supporting partners that can help roll out innovations and see your time to market go faster. 
Design Organized Workflows: Develop a workflow that lessens downtime and encourages efficiency. For instance, put a stop to compartmentalised departments and have a system wherein all workers can share their expertise openly.  
Find Ways to Track Results Effectively:  Ideally, every team member should be involved in the design and development process. One way to do this is to share information as this encourages collaboration and fluidity among teams. Bear in mind that gathering and sharing crucial and real-time information helps the various innovation teams develop agility and make good decisions quickly and efficiently.

The odds that your company will succeed grows the more you can reduce Time to Market for innovations. A fast TTM means consumers will receive your product faster, giving you a big advantage over your competitors. So think carefully about whether your company should opt for resource efficiency or flow efficiency as this will impact how your innovations will be handled.

Successful companies are based on five pillars: the ability to reduce time to market, connecting strategy to daily operations, having an environment of continuous improvement, creating an environment of sharing knowledge and drive innovation. Analyse these 5 areas in your organisation right now to find out how close your organisation is from achieving fantastic results.

The post Time to Market: How your Company Can Keep Launching New Products and Features Ahead of Your Competition appeared first on Luís Gonçalves.

Design Thinking: Understanding the Method Behind the Idea

In a 2014 assessment handled by the Design Management Institute, the performance of design-led corporations like Apple, Nike, and Procter & Gamble exceeded that of the S&P 500 for the past decade by as much as 219%. Now many organizations want to learn design-based thinking – a distinct way that designers come up with solutions to problems.

When people are faced with a problem, their initial reaction is that they have to solve it. But a better question they should be asking is what they can do to help them understand the problem or situation better and how to move forward. This is where Design Thinking comes into play. When design principles are adapted to innovation and strategy, the odds of developing something worthwhile increases dramatically.

Understanding Design Thinking

Design Thinking is a method used by designers to figure out complicated problems and find the best solutions for their clients. A designer’s mentality is more focused on the solution than the problem. After all, a designer is geared to act and create a preferred future. The process calls on imagination, intuition, logic, as well as systemic reasoning to explore all possible options and to design the desired result that would give the end user the greatest advantage.

Unsurprisingly, many educators and corporate individuals are skeptical of Design Thinking and wary of how it can positively impact their system. But as Nigel Cross said in his book “Designerly Ways of Knowing,” one’s whole environment has been designed. He also stated that “Design ability is, in fact, one of the three fundamental dimensions of human intelligence.”

Art, design, and science are the triumvirate responsible for the cognitive abilities of humans. Art is all about finding the differences among similar things while science finds similarities among that which are different. Meanwhile, the design brings about inconceivable “parts” or situations to create a possible “whole” or solution.

Benefits of Using the Design Thinking Process

Design Thinking provides people with a novel and effective way of thinking about the things they question about in the world and the problems they usually face. It helps a person to step outside traditional methods and to discover new solutions to old problems. Sometimes it’s not even about solving a problem, but about finding a better way to do things.

Contrary to what a lot of people think, Design Thinking is not just for design-oriented and technology companies. Government agencies, health care, the financial sector and non-profit organizations can also benefit from it. In short, every industry would do well to take advantage of this fashion of thinking and enjoy the following benefits:

   Design Thinking Prioritizes the User

This method places a high priority on the end user. The aim is to design products and solutions that perfectly align with the users’ needs. Design Thinking is innately human-centric, which means solutions entail getting close to the user to see how they feel about the problem and how their lives and experiences can be improved.

   Process Influences Collective Expertise

By creating multidisciplinary teams and engaging numerous voices and experts, Design Thinking helps problem solvers break out of their niches or industries to influence collective expertise, experience, and knowledge. With numerous skills and philosophies involved, solutions become inclusive and flexible.

   Method Utilizes Empathy

Empathy is at the center of Design Thinking. Empathy is sometimes referred to as “understanding” or “discovery.” Regardless of the term use, it demands understanding and identifying with the needs and difficulties of the product user, the system used or the experience. Empathy is different from sympathy. Empathy is feeling for the end user.  Sympathy is merely acknowledging the feeling of your end user. Design Thinking thrives in the essence of empathy. Problem solvers put themselves in the shoes of the users instead of just referencing from the feedbacks provided to them.

   Design Thinking Tests Until Perfect

If empathy is the heart of Design Thinking, “design, test, and repeat” is its core mantra. This allows designers to have unexpected breakthroughs by creating numerous prototypes rapidly and stimulating quick feedback from real customers and actual users before the company spends too much time, money, or effort on one idea. The methodology is not as clean as the more linear and traditional problem-solving approaches but it generates more powerful and interesting results.

   Values are Created While Crucial Problems are Solved

Design Thinking is not just about inventing new products and services; it’s also about creating value and finding good solutions to existing problems. The method uses design principles to solve small and large issues of every industry.

When done properly, design thinking grabs the mindset and requirements of the people you’re designing for. It also provides you with a look at the opportunities that will be opened based on the needs of the client. It can also be used as the cornerstone of your offers and designs.

5 Stages of the Design Thinking Method

There’s no question that the Design Thinking method is very useful in dealing with challenging problems that are unknown or ill-defined. Problem solvers can do so by having a keen understanding of the human needs at play and then re-evaluating the situation in a human-centric way. They can then start brainstorming to create various ideas and then developing prototypes of the solution and testing them.

You can apply this method to solve difficult problems that crop up, regardless of whether it’s in a business setting or something larger. But in order to do that, one has to understand the methodology.

There are various Design Thinking models. One of the earliest ones was created by Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize laureate. His model consisted of seven stages and influenced most of the Design Thinking models being used today.

Another popularly used model was developed by Standford University’s Hasso-Plattner Institute. According to this model, there are five stages of Design Thinking – Empathise, Defining the Problem, Ideate/ Idea Generation, Prototype, and Test.

Empathize

The first step in Design Thinking is to put yourself in your client’s shoes and acquire an empathic understanding of the dilemma you are tasked to solve. You can do this through immersion – literally living in the physical construct in order to have a deep personal understanding of the issues. Another option would be to consult specialists to learn more about the situation through observation, engagement and empathizing with others to understand their side, motivations, and experiences.

Empathy is vital in such a human-centric process like Design Thinking. It allows designers to remain objective about the situation so they can have a clear insight of the clients and their needs. While there might be time constraints on the project, this is the stage where copious amounts of data are gathered. The information collected will be used in the next step and is also utilized to create the best view of the users, their requirements, and the roadblocks that face the development of a specific product.

Defining the Problem

After empathizing and gathering information, the next step is to collate all data and start defining the problem. As the problem solver, you will have to assess and analyze all information and synthesize them to identify the main problems. In this stage, you have to come up with a problem statement that will define the problem in a human-centric way.

Typically, companies would define the problem as one of their needs. For instance, they would state something like “We have to boost our product’s market share among preteens by 10 percent.” However, a better option of defining the problem in a humanizing way would be to say “Preteens require nutrient-rich food in order to grow, remain healthy and thrive.”

The second stage is also where the design team begins to gather ideas to establish functions, features, and other vital components that will assist them in either coming up with a solution or helping users resolve issues independently with minimal difficulties. At this junction, problem solvers will start laying the groundwork for the third stage by developing questions that can jumpstart the creation of solutions. For instance, the team might ask themselves – “How can we encourage preteens to do something that will keep them healthy while involving our product or service?”

Idea Generation

The third stage of the Design Thinking process will see the design team ready to begin generating possible solutions. With the empathy you developed for the client in the first stage and a clear definition of the problem, you and your team can start generating ideas to either create new solutions or to look for another method of viewing the dilemma. This is also the stage where designers have to think outside the box and unleash their creativity.

Design teams can use any of the numerous idea creation techniques at their disposal, like Brainstorm, SCAMPER, or Worst Possible Idea. Each technique has their own pros and cons, but it’s critical that you create as many solutions or ideas as possible at this stage before you can take the next step and start testing them.

Prototype Development

Problem solvers would start producing several scaled-down prototypes of the product or its particular features so the team can examine the solutions generated during the previous stage. These prototypes can be shared and investigated by the design team, by other departments, or by a small section of people outside the company. Bear in mind that the goal of this stage is to pinpoint the best solution for every problem identified during the initial stages so there are a lot of experimentation involved. The solutions are then executed on the prototypes, examined, and are approved, enhanced and reassessed, or rejected outright. Any rejection will have to be based on the clients’ experiences and feedback.

After testing the prototypes, the designers would have a good idea of the product’s limitations, any problems that have surfaced, and have a clearer perspective of how users will behave, feel, and think when using the product.

Testing

The final stage of the Design Thinking process will see the design team vigorously testing the product using the best solution chosen during the prototyping stage. This is a repetitive process. The results of the tests are used to reevaluate problems and update users’ understanding, the conditions the product is used, how the consumer would behave, feel, and think, and to empathize. Changes and refinements are still being made to the product at this stage. This is to rule out every solution and develop a deep understanding of the product and the consumers.

It should be pointed out that while the aforementioned Design Thinking stages are discussed in a linear fashion, the process is very flexible. For instance, stages can be conducted simultaneously by different team members. Designers can also gather information and churn out prototypes during the entirety of the project so that they can visualize every solution. Results from the testing stage could also result in new ideas and lead to another round of brainstorming or prototype development.

What Design Thinking Means in Business

Design thinking is perfect for coming up with cutting-edge solutions. With it, companies can make decisions and come up with changes based on what prospective clients really desire instead of just depending on historical data or taking risky chances. They can depend on tangible evidence and not just rely on instinct, thereby saving money in the long run.

Remember that every business has a long-list of goals, from developing and releasing new products, boosting sales by engaging customers to providing clients with better customer support. But whenever a business decides to try and meet those goals, large amounts of time and money are utilized, especially in major corporations. Applying the Design Thinking method can help a company save money immediately since it targets specific solutions that customers need. This is achieved after discovering different ways of looking at the problem while providing insights and data that would be used to develop a solution that will help the company make money.

Design Thinking can also mean huge savings in government agencies. For instance, utilizing this method helped the US Department of Veteran Affairs Center for Innovation understand how war veterans interacted with the department. The steps used in Design Thinking showed the government the challenges veterans face when working with the VA. It also provided insight as to how employees can empathize, connect with their customers and work more effectively.

Design Thinking is the future. With it, businesses can really meet consumer demands and come up with the solutions that are user-centric. But a clear understanding of how to use this method is necessary if you want to stay ahead of the competition.

The post Design Thinking: Understanding the Method Behind the Idea appeared first on Luís Gonçalves.

How Communities of Practice Help Companies Have Learning and Growth-Driven Employees

HOW COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE HELP COMPANIES HAVE LEARNING AND GROWTH-DRIVEN EMPLOYEES

If your building a company that has a ‘culture of sharing’ where people regardless of their roles and tenure are willing to help one another; value learning as an inevitable tool to growth and success; and have the attitude of ‘making each other better’; you are undoubtedly building the right culture of your company.

Not only does this culture of knowledge transfer benefits the organization as a whole (as people share their best practices to achieve a common goal), it also benefits every individual in the organization through the continuous inflow of knowledge and ideas. It’s the power of Communities of Practice.

What are Communities of Practice?

In whatever kind of organization – may it be in business, education, or government – in one way or another people come together to collaborate, share ideas and know-hows, and solve problems as a group.

It’s an age-old phenomenon. But it was not until in the early 1990s that it was put together in one learning concept that is used in many organizational settings today.

First introduced by Etienne Wenger (educational theorist) and Jean Lave  (cognitive anthropologist) in 1991, community of practice (CoP) refers to any group “of people who share a common interest” and learn how to “do it better through regular interaction”.

They can be any group of people – a group of engineers learning a new process, a network of medical practitioners exploring the effectiveness of certain drugs, or diplomats learning about how a new form of technology can benefit their nations.

Note, however, that not all communities can be considered communities of practices. There are three important elements that set CoPs apart from the rest:

Shared domain of interest (Domain) – CoPs are not simple ‘networks’ of people sharing one or two commonalities. A community of practice can be created with the goal of gaining knowledge related to a specific field. Domain refers to the group’s identity defined based on the common goals or interests of the people in the group. Members imply a commitment to that domain with a shared competence that distinguishes them from other people.  

The community – to achieve their common goals, people in a CoP engages in activities and discussions, sharing their own expertise and learning from others. Imagine a regular meetup of visual effects professionals in a certain location. Each month, they come together for a half-day of forum, inviting senior VFX directors or industry leaders to give a talk on certain topics. Regardless of the organizations they’re part of, these people do share an identity and common goal, which is, most probably, to expand their skills and knowledge. Over time, through collaboration done over coffee and some pizzas, relationships are built, which in turn enable mutual learning.

The practice – members of CoPs are practitioners who share resources, tools, techniques, and ideas. They develop ways of addressing problems which often lead to innovation. Members apply their newly learned practices to their individual careers. Simply exchanging ideas about a certain topic through some random conversations is not enough. In CoPs, the ‘sharing culture’ is more or less self-conscious.

Communities of practice evolve and cultivate through these essential elements. Without one of these three, a CoP cannot exist.

CoPs in Organizational Settings

Communities of practices can collaborate practically anywhere.  They can exist in physical settings, for example, in the lunchroom at work or in a field setting. But members need not meet face-to-face. They can collaborate virtually and share their best practices. Think about webinars and online meetups. Some groups meet on a regular basis, some infrequently.

Some CoPs are highly organized, with codes of conducts, standard roles and responsibilities, strategic plans, even budgets.

What makes CoPs successful over time is their ability to generate enough value, relevance and excitement among members. As people are bound by their desire to learn, grow, and help their colleagues, communities of practices continue to attract and engage members.

Despite the differences in the setup, size, and number, communities of practices always involve learning. Learning is the major reason why people meet together or the unintentional outcome of the members’ regular interaction.

Thinking Together: Learning Within Communities of Practice

We all are part of a CoP in one way or another, maybe through our profession or trade, leisure or interest, or within our respective organizations. While individuals learn from their participation in the activities and discussions, the most important benefit of communities of practice is the development of newer or deeper levels of knowledge that result from the regular interaction and activities.

The second definition of community of practice, according to Lave and Wenger, is the process of generating, applying and reproducing knowledge. They call it “legitimate peripheral participation” (LPP). Based on this concept, learning takes place as people make their way towards full participation in the community. Initially, they may participate in simple low-risk tasks. But over time, they become more acquainted with the tasks, language, and organizing principles of the community.

As novice members turn into old timers and gain more mastery of their profession, their level of participation becomes even more central to the smooth functioning of the community.

Another key concept within LPP is that learners must have access to experts. They should either be members or aspire membership to the community wherein the experts’ practices are central. Otherwise, they will have less access to the tools and resources of the community, and therefore, have limited growth.

Communities of Practice vs. Teams

CoPs are often confused with other types of groups or functional teams. However, there are key differences that should be noted, according to the “Creating and Facilitating Communities of Practice” article published by the Queen’s University School of Business.

Objective – in CoPs, the main goal is to share knowledge and promote learning within their domain. In teams, however, members are more concerned about completing a task.

Membership – people join a community of practice voluntarily. In teams, members are selected based on their ability to contribute to the team’s goals.

Organization – CoPs can be either formal or informal, collaborating through coffee meetings or meetups. They are self-organizing and leaders might be selected depending on the issue being discussed. Teams are hierarchical in nature, with a lead or project manager supervising the entire group.

Management – CoPs are built on mutual relationships between members whereas, in teams, members coordinate with each other for many interdependent tasks.

Termination – community of practices evolve. It is terminated only when there is no more interest. Teams end when the project is completed, although in some cases, they may evolve into a community.

How to Build a Community of Practice within Your Organization

There are many benefits of cultivating a community of practice in corporate settings. Not only does it help expand the professional knowledge and skills of the members, it also helps the company develop strategies to address various challenges. Since communities of practice can exist online and offline. They are ideal for all types of organizations, from brick-and-mortar companies to web-based companies.

Create a clear set of objectives.

Because in organizations, the members have different backgrounds, probably coming from varying professions and skill sets, it is important to determine the specific goals of the community. Whether it’s developing a training strategy, changing processes, addressing a pressing issue, or improving the performance of a particular department, it is important for the members of a community of practice to understand what their goals for collaborating are.

Know each member.

Ideally, you want a diverse group of people who will each present something unique to the table. Since in corporate settings, the number of members can be limited (could be employees from just one department), you want to be sure that a wide range of employees is represented. If the intention of the CoP affects the organization as a whole, all departments or teams must have their own representatives.

Collaboration should be free-flowing.

Communities of practices aren’t like typical workshops or forums. In CoPs, members learn from each other. Discussions are lively, highly interactive, and targeted to a common interest or domain. Holding regular meetings are important not only for the purpose of sharing knowledge but also in establishing relationships and better communication – keys to a successful collaboration.

Utilize technology for better collaboration.

Project management software tools can boost the community’s effort to share resources and knowledge despite geographical boundaries. Through these platforms, members can share documents, assign tasks, communicate, and stay up-to-date with the group’s calendar of activities. In addition to these, social media platforms are also a great venue for forums, exchange of ideas, and other forms of communication. Creating innovative solutions is much quicker through these networking platforms.

Focus on value.

As mentioned earlier, communities of practices differ from teams because they focus on the value they deliver to one another, or in this case, their organization. Value is the key because CoPs are voluntary. At earlier stage of a CoP, the value comes from the current problems and needs of the community. As it grows and develops, the value is derived from creating a systematic body of knowledge that can be easily accessed by the members.

Encourage different levels of participation.

Members’ level of participation varies. It’s normal that some would participate regularly sharing insights to everyone in the group. Others follow the discussions but do not take leading roles in making contributions. Some may not be as active until some parts of the discussion has engaged them fully. All levels of participation should be accepted and encouraged within the community.

Offer support and resources to the community.

The success of the community of practice within the organization hinges greatly upon the support that the organization itself provides. The CoP must have access to the tools, resources, fund (if needed) that are necessary for them to continue with their collaboration and activities, especially in the beginning stages. With the strong support from the organization, particularly its leaders, communities of practices are likely to develop better strategies to address the pressing needs of the entire organization.

Challenges

Despite the undeniable benefits of nurturing communities of practices within organizations, not all companies are able to effectively implement and sustain CoPs. Aside from the fact that the concept was just recently introduced, the informal and spontaneous nature of these communities make it difficult for most organizations to monitor and support their growth.

Takeaways . . .

The idea of sharing and collaboration as a means of obtaining knowledge has long been practiced by individuals around the world. However, it was not until about thirty years ago since that the idea became more standardized through the concept known as “community of practice”.

Communities develop their practice through a variety of activities. These include access to information, sharing experiences, problem solving, coordination and strategy, building arguments, discussing projects and developments, and many more.

There isn’t a highly defined structural framework for a community of practice unlike most types of organized communities. The setup can be anywhere from a formal to informal networks designed specifically for efficient knowledge-sharing and exploration. CoPs can be role-based too. For instance, developers need to talk to other developers, quality auditors need to talk to other quality specialists, and project managers need to collaborate with other managers across teams. This is necessary for continuous learning and mastery of their roles, and for adopting new methods and techniques.

Forming communities of practice within your organization is one way to promote high-level of learning and development. Apart from helping the entire organization develop new strategies and solve company-wide challenges, CoP helps individual members expand their professional knowledge base. CoP members exhibit different levels of participation and move freely across these levels as their needs and interest evolve.

Regardless of the size and nature of your organization, tapping into the collective skill sets of your members is a powerful approach to scale up your organization as what I’ve always recommended long time ago in my previous blog post. Whether you’re exploring a new process or developing strategies, a community of practice provides room for creating a culture of sharing where members collaborate to share and obtain knowledge, and form innovative ideas that lead to groundbreaking outcomes.

The post How Communities of Practice Help Companies Have Learning and Growth-Driven Employees appeared first on Luís Gonçalves.

The Agile Retrospective Format For Any Retrospective

Agile Retrospective Format

In today´s post, I want to talk about the Agile Retrospective format. I met several Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches that facilitate Agile Retrospectives without knowing this concept. In my opinion, a successful Agile Retrospective must follow somehow this structure.

This concept was introduced some years ago by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen, in their book “Agile Retrospectives.

They explained to us that there are five different phases of an Agile Retrospective and this is what I want to explain to you in this post.

Set the Stage

When holding a retrospective, a direction is essential to a successful session. Ergo, always start with an introductory period that focuses on the retrospective: setting the stage and the atmosphere for the rest of the discussion.

Foremost, if you want people to be engaged and willing to work with you, it’s a good idea to take a moment to thank them for investing their time in the retrospective, as doing so will make them feel like valued contributors. Having done so, make the purpose of the retrospective clear, and outline the goal for the session. You should also give a timeframe for the session.

After the basics have been laid out, it’s imperative to have everyone in the room speak up; it only needs to be brief (a word or two from each person describing what he or she hopes to get out of the retrospective), but it’s important to break the ice in this manner.

It will go a long way toward helping those present to overcome any nerves, and communicate more readily: thereby facilitating group-think and effective learning.

Once everyone has made their verbal contribution, outline the approach for the session— this will maintain momentum and a sense of direction. Most people automatically “tune out” mentally when they feel they are about to be subjected to an aimless, dull meeting- so keeping a sense of pace is integral to a productive group session.

Once the framework for the retrospective is in place, work on making people feel comfortable with the idea of discussing difficult, challenging topics. Set parameters for acceptable behaviour (e.g. team values and working agreements) so that people know how to talk about difficult or emotional issues, and deliver news that may not be welcomed by the team.

If the team already has a set of team values, it’s a good idea to keep the values of the retrospective consistent with these, insofar as is possible. Think of how existing team values can be adapted to the retrospective, and be prepared to answer questions from team members regarding how these values can be applied.

Likewise, post the existing working agreement (if there is one) and adjust it as needed so that it effectively applies to the retrospective (for example, if the usual working agreement asks that code be ready by a certain juncture, adapt it to require that every team have their work ready to present to those attending the retrospective).

If there is no working agreement, draw one up before the retrospective goes any further. Generally, these should have fewer than five tenets—any more than this is too complicated to be practical—and should make everyone in the session accountable for his or her behaviour, so as to foster civility and collaboration.

While it’s true that doing this mid-session risks losing some of the inertia momentum you have been working to build, think of it as an investment; for the ten or fifteen minutes you spend on the working agreement, you get something you can use not only throughout future retrospectives but in daily working life as well. (Note that this exercise also often reveals what people are worried about, which is valuable information regarding what needs to be addressed).

The introductory session, when done right (and when values and working agreements already exist), may take as little as five minutes to complete. That being said, it remains valuable, and should not be skipped even as retrospective leaders and teams become more experienced. No matter how familiar people are with the proceedings, after all, failing to ensure that everyone speaks up early in the session may allow some team members to stay silent throughout, which impacts the overall quality of the retrospective.

Likewise, without there being a clear group approach, people may insert their own feelings and agendas into the retrospective, in turn derailing the session. If they do so, what will the interactions devolve into in the absence of working agreements and team values being firmly set in place? Prevention, as they say, is worth a pound of cure.

Gather Data

Iterations, while often brief, are packed with important events and interactions; as such, it’s highly recommended that data is gathered throughout  (the shorter the iteration is, the more important this actually becomes—consider the fact that if a team member misses one day in a week-long iteration, he or she will have missed 20% of it).

Likewise, when so much information is packed into a short period, team members often cannot catch everything that is going on around them, or may leap to hurried conclusions, and thus have conflicting ideas about the same events. Data, in such instances, is needed to create a clear shared picture of what has occurred.

Data should cover events (this can be anything suitably meaningful to the team, such as meetings, decision points, changes in team membership, milestones, celebrations, and implementing new technologies), metrics (burn-down charts, velocity, defect counts, etc.), and any features or stories the team has completed. Calendars, documents, charts, and so on should be used by the team to further enhance this data.

Data should be reported during retrospectives using a mix of verbal reporting and visual aids such as task boards and charts; if you’re going far back in time, a timeline will also be useful. Without well-planned visual aids, people often cannot detect relevant patterns and make other connections effectively.

Remember, too, that the content should not be completely “dry” in nature; feelings are also important to stories and reveal to team leaders what the members of the team were most concerned about during the iteration. If one does not allow an emotional component (and structure it properly) during retrospectives, these worries often slowly eat away at team members, undermining morale and productivity.

Close the ‘Data Gathering’ stage with a quick review of all available data, inviting everyone on the team to look through it and comment on any patterns or changes that they see. This allows everyone attending the retrospective to develop a group perspective on the data before proceeding, thus reducing the likelihood of conflict (as people will not be viewing the data from a narrow, individual perspective).

Generate Ideas

Data is useless without interpretation and insight; as such, every retrospective should contain a stage where people ask candid questions, where they point out what they see going wrong—and going right—and ask, “Why?”

As part of doing so, one should examine the various situations that arose in the prior iteration, breaking down the interactions that occurred within them and looking for patterns of either functionality or dysfunctionality. The team should assess risks and factor in unexpected events and outcomes.

This should take the form of a measured, logical approach; remember that people tend to leap to any and all available solutions once a problem is presented, and the first solution posited is often not the best one. During the insight-generating stage, all possibilities should be considered, along with their ramifications, and the group should be encouraged to do so analytically and to do so together.

Not only will this lead to better solutions, it will help the team learn to work together better, through exercising the overall group dynamic in an environment where free thought is encouraged. (Likewise, this kind of experimentation encourages “big picture” thinking).

The insight-generation stage is crucial as it allows the team to see how both circumstance and their own actions and behaviours affect their ability to develop software. Without this stage, there can be no establishing of cause and effect.

Decide what to do

Once the team has agreed on a handful of the best possible solutions, they need to settle on just one or two of them to utilise in the coming iteration and decide on how best to do so. The team leader must once again provide direction, in the form of structure and guidance, while the team plans the coming experiments and actions.

He or she needs to judge the overall mood of the team; are they ready to handle something complex? Or are they recovering from a stressful event and need to step back and work on something simple?

The Decision Stage should involve the use of story cards or backlog items during the planning process, as this will make it easier to implement improvement plans during the actual work that will occur in the next iteration.

Remember that the retrospective should segue naturally into iteration planning, so try to hold retrospectives just prior to that period (having the retrospective in the morning and iteration planning in the afternoon is ideal).

As a final note, while retrospectives revolve greatly around group-think, do ensure that by the Decision Stage, people have committed to the upcoming tasks individually as well. People need a clear sense of their individual duties—otherwise they tend to assume the group as a whole or someone else in the group, is responsible for the tasks at hand.

Closing

Try to close retrospectives in a proactive, inspiring, motivating way—the team will need this sense of momentum to take into the coming iteration. People should walk away with a clear idea of what needs to be done, how it will be documented, and what the follow-up will be.

The team should also leave with a host of reminders that will help them remember what they have learned during the retrospective; otherwise, at least some of it will slip away.

Illustrate new practices with posters or with large, visible charts and make sure the team records their progress on these. The whiteboard used during the retrospective should be printed or scanned.

Finally, take a few minutes, to sum up the retrospective itself and request feedback on what went well during it, and what needs to be done better next time. It’s not only our iterations that need improvement, after all—the whole teamwork ecosystem benefits from frequent reflection and maintenance.

If you are interested in getting some extra Agile Retrospectives exercises, I created a blog post with dozens of Agile Retrospectives Ideas, check them and see if you find something interesting.

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Helpful Way To Express Your Team´s Feelings in a Team Retrospective

Express Yourself is a simple Check-In agile retrospective exercise that aims at visualizing the team´s ideas and helping to gather data early in the team retrospective session.

Often it is difficult for people to express their feelings and opinions especially when team members are shy or if there are new team members or even for members with strong personalities.

This activity gives everyone an opportunity to describe how they feel about a certain topic.

Benefits and what to consider before starting

This exercise gets the team members thinking about the events that triggered those feelings, which can lead to a deeper and more meaningful conversation later on.

Since this is an opening activity, it is a quick way to determine the team’s attitude coming into the session.  Additionally, it will be good for those who are ready to jump right into the details.

Sometimes team members go into the retrospective with issues in mind and are very passionate when expressing their opinion. The Scrum Master should be mindful to keep the scope of the conversation on the team’s sentiment, not finding solutions. This should be done in later exercises. Also, make sure the conversation doesn’t carry on too long as this is just a warm up activity.

Timeline to use in this team retrospective

This is the timeline I recommend to keep:

Set up 1 – 2 minutes
Silent writing 2 – 3 minutes
Post feelings 1 – 2 minutes
Discussion 6 – 8 minutes

Instructions

1. Draw a horizontal line or use tape on a white board, window or a wall.

2. Place one post-it note at one end with a smiley face and one at the other end with a sad face to create the range of emotions.

3. Provide each team member with 1 post-it note.

4. Allow the team to write one word that describes how they feel about the last Sprint or any other given topic. Use 2-3 minutes

5. Have the team place their post-it note on the range of emotions where they think their feeling best fits in.

6. Evaluate the emotions and discuss each one individually.

7. Ask the team to explain why they felt that way.  Make sure the conversation does not take more than 8 minutes. The focus is on the team’s current emotions. Solutions to problems should not be discussed yet.

8. Once everyone has shared their emotions, thank them for sharing their thoughts and move on to the next planned exercise.

 

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Fun Retrospective Activity – 2 Truths and a Lie Retrospective Exercise

Fun Retrospective Activity – 2 Truths and a Lie Retrospective Exercise

Two Truths and a Lie is a fun retrospective activity that I have used couple of times to ‘break the ice’ at group meetings.

In past, I had a team that was very familiar with each other, but was getting bored with standard retrospective exercises, making the team collaboration inactive. That´s when I decided to transform this classic ice breaker activity into a new retrospective exercise.

What can you expect – the outcome

This fun retrospective activity will help you promote team collaboration, to generate a praise report and define actionable retrospective items. Action items are used to focus around team improvement areas and the praise report used by the team to celebrate the successes of the previous sprint.

Two Truths and a Lie exercise is suitable for all team maturity levels.

There is one rule I recommend to follow: each person should make three statements about the past sprint, of which two will be true and one will be a lie. These statements can be related to any likes/dislikes, experiences, skills or habits.

Instructions & Timing

Setting up the Game – 10 min

Gather the team members in a circle and explain the rules.  Give everyone post-its and a marker to write down their three statements (2 – true, 1 – lie). Give them 7 minutes to organize their ideas (statements). Afterwards, each team member will have 3 post-its, each containing one statement.

Playing Two Truths and a Lie – 3 min (per person)

 

Select a team member to present to the group there three statements.  After the statements have been presented, the group will discusses the statements and decide which statement they believe is the lie. If the group does not agree on which statement is a lie, have a show-of-hands vote, and select the statement with the majority of the votes.  After a statement has been selected, the presenter will then reveal to the group whether they guessed correctly, by indicating which of the statements is a lie.

Move on to the next team member and continue until everyone has revealed their statements.

Wrap up Discussion – 20 Min

After revealing the statements, collect and categorize all the Truths and Lies with a negative significance. Discuss these with the team and identify what could have been done better to remediate these items.

Afterwards, create a list of actionable solutions for each statement and ask the team to vote the items they want to focus on in the next sprint. Add the remaining actionable items to the retrospective backlog to be tackled in a future sprint.

Variations and tips for this fun retrospective activity

Two Truths and a Lie Strategies

People can use different tactics to hide their lies. For example, three unusual statements are possibly hardest to evaluate against each other. Lies are normally harder to identify if the group believes that the team member might be telling the truth. People find it harder to believe truths if they don´t feel they can relate them with the team member.

Two Truths and a Wish

In this variation, team members can identify 3 statements, two of which are true statements and one statement that is phrased as a wish, rather than a lie.  This is a fun alternative to help the team work through their statements, especially if you have a team that is struggling to create lie statements.

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Top 3 Reasons Why Companies Struggle With Agile and Scrum

Why Companies Struggle With Agile and Scrum

Agile methodologies involve new values, practices, principles, and benefits in comparison to traditional Waterfall method. As agile is a radical alternative to command-and-control-style management, its methodologies have spread across various industries and functions and also into the C-suite. National Public Radio(NPR) uses agile methods to create new programmes. One of the leaders in cloud backup services, Intronis, employs agile in marketing. C.H. Robinson is a known third-party logistics provider globally, deploys them in human resources.

The effective implementation allows businesses to take employees out of their functional silos and turning them to self-managed and customer-focused multidisciplinary teams, speeding up profitable growth and helping to create a new generation of skilled managers.

The general adoption of agile ideas, tools, and frameworks by businesses have happened, but only a few of them are making the most of its benefits by accepting agility as the end goal. Baked into frameworks of agile is risk mitigation. Risk can come in different forms like:

Not suitable for purpose
Not liked by customers
Changing of conditions
Cost overruns
Missing of deadlines
Quality is low
Compromise on security

If you are using Scrum, Kanban, XP, or SAFe; it doesn’t mean you are appropriately protecting yourself from these risks. This means you are not making the most of benefits. When it comes to traditional SDLCs, they were designed to mitigate risk. The roles of project managers make a difference, ensuring risk mitigation appropriately.

If we talk about flexibility and change; traditional SDLCs usually go too far with control and do not provide expected benefits. I am not saying waterfall is bad, but it requires you know with certainty the end state, the cost to get there, and its time of completion. Any change to the plan risks disrupting the certainty in these variables and the happiness of your customers.

Transition to agile requires the understanding of agile manifesto and its frameworks. This article guides about all the reasons behind the organization’s struggle with agile and scrum.

Work Culture

Organizations need to understand that the methods that comprise “Agile” will not solve any pertinent issue in their culture or “the behavior of their employees.” Problems of distrust, lack accountability, respect, or fear of failure are all readily exposed by Scrum( Framework of agile). For instance, the goal of scrum is to produce a potentially releasable product increment in every sprint that often exposes the business to the “technical debt” due to past product development efforts that has not been paid off and lack of quality practices within software engineering.

Most of the organizations are not able to deal with these surfacing issues. As they don’t have a neutral party to facilitate their exploration and resolution, most organizations tend to ignore them or consider Agile/Scrum liable to create them.

One of the co-founders of Scrum, Ken Schwaber, states that Scrum holds a mirror up to the organization.

In case that mirror reflects back, an organization does not like and blames the “mirror” rather than looking at the objectively provided feedback and evaluating to address it.

Independent work

The scrum involves two concepts empowerment and autonomy and if a team is not functioning independently; there is a problem.  According to Michele Sliger, coauthor of The Software Project Manager’s Bridge to Agility and president of Sliger Consulting, it may be that team members don’t understand how to adapt their new roles. Most of the times, it’s an indication that a project manager does not want to give up control.

According to Sliger, ” The control freak project managers do not let go of decision making and give no control to the members of team.”

What is the result?

When the team members do not feel that they are in charge, they do not accept changes and revert to take orders and prefer to work within their comfort zones, taking them back to waterfall. “Giving ownership to the team will bring accountability,” according to Sliger. Your employees are likely to step back from responsibilities if they feel that they are doing what they are told and the attitude is like, ‘Not my circus, not my monkeys.”

What is the way to foster independence?

If you want the effective implementation of agile methodologies, empower your teams to work freely while relaxing them from constant checking of higher-ups or set them free to make decisions and changes. If the project manager can’t cede control, then agile and Scrum training may help them to adapt to their new role in Scrum.

Not implementing as directed

As Agile methods are framework-based; they provide the minimal set of artifacts, roles, and ceremonies essential to create a product frequently. The adoption of these methods allows people to add things to the framework that are beneficial to them. For instance, various teams often leverage practices from Extreme Programming (XP) like Pair programming or Continuous Integration. The additions are accepted because they help teams to become self-organizing that is important in agile.

Sometimes, organizations take advantage of freedom and compromise on the simple set of practices that Scrum advocates. Scrum necessitates on the need for a Product Owner who is knowledgeable, decisive and available to the team, but organizations mostly skip this as they find difficult to search for a suitable person with required skills. Scrum is a framework, and the organizations move forward adopting “Scrum” without a Product Owner. When they struggle, they don’t get the reason for their failure that why they are not realizing the benefits from it as in real they are not practicing it perfectly.

The solution to this struggle is to invest in experienced and dedicated Scrum Masters. A Scrum Master is an unbiased, servant leader who makes sure that Scrum team lives by the values and practices of Scrum. He/She removes impediments to progress, facilitate meetings, and work with the product owner to keep the product backlog in good shape and ready for the next sprint.

Conclusion

Agile is worth investing the effort and time in for your company. You just need to practice it correctly, and it will become easy to incorporate it into an existing company framework. A business can expect to have a bumpy road with some developers, and it remains for some time, and your business will soon realize its benefits after its proper implementation.

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How to Develop Your Strategic Lean Change Canvas

Change is as much an art as it is a science, but it seems that too many people are focused on tool sand methods and are not thinking the art is needed as well.

Before the book Lean Change Management by Jason Little was published, 2 problems occurred:

How can change agents convince stakeholders who promote change initiatives to accept uncertainty that change brings and use a feedback-driven approach to change?
How do change agents start a change initiative using Lean Change Management approach?

After couple of weeks of study, Jason and other organizational practitioners came to the following conclusions:

Change agents know that a feedback-driven approach to change is more effective. They also know that the plan does not survive the first contact with people affected by the change.
Using lighter-weight planning tools is the key for convincing stakeholders that a plan is in place. The plan is created through organizational feedback.
Using Agile practices, like lean coffee or retrospectives can reduce the symptom of resistance by creating an extra feedback loop about the change.
Visualizing the change through canvases and big information radiators are more effective than traditional software-based tools.

It´s important to select and develop your own change process that best suits to your organization. There are 4 main components to developing your own change management process:

Developing your Strategic Lean Change Canvas
Aligning your organization
Developing your Change Agent Network
Executing the Lean Change Management Cycle

In this post, we will guide you through developing the strategic lean change canvas.

Developing your Strategic Lean Change Canvas
Source: Lean Change Management by Jason Little

 

Many companies are starting with a change strategy. That´s important, however, it´s also crucial how you create it.

The best way is to create it through a facilitated session using big, visible canvases, and sticky notes on a wall.

The goal of the lean change canvas is to help align people in your organization to answer the most important questions they have when change is introduced:

What is the vision for our organization? First talk about the vision and then do a visioning exercise
Why is this change important to the organization? Create urgency by asking “Why is this change important?” Urgency is a matter of perspective, so consider multiple points of view.
How will we measure success? These are typically business objectives.
How will we show progress? These are the indicators that show your organization is heading in the right direction.
Who is affected by the change and what will they need to do differently? You can explore this question using the McKinsey 7S model.
How will the change team support people through the transition? You should answer the questions like “How will you communicate the change? How will you collect feedback about the change?”
What´s the plan? Use ideas from Kanban to help you sequence the changes. One of the objectives of Kanban is to limit work in progress, by doing this it will reduce the change fatigue effect.

Facilitating a Strategic Change Canvas session

There are several different approaches for group facilitation. The most important thing is to visualize the canvas on a wall using sticky notes.

First create a lean change canvas on a wall and use the following questions to guide you to complete the canvas:

What points haven´t we considered yet?
What are our assumptions about this strategy?
What is our riskiest assumption?
How often should we review this strategy?
How will we collect feedback from staff
What other important information should we put on this canvas?

Who should be involved in a session?

The change sponsor: C-level executive or VP

The change team: It´s a team, employees, consultants that will facilitate the change. Do not rely only on consultants.

The executive team (optional): It´s up to you if you want to include executive team, it may depend on the size and structure of your organization.

Once the Strategic Lean Change Canvas has been created, it´s time to start aligning stakeholders in your organization with your change strategy.

If you´re interested in attending one of our Lean Change Agent workshops, please visit the training calendar page.

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Sources and references:

Lean Change Management book by Jason Little

 

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Using lean change management framework to make sense of Insights

Change Management Framework to make sense of Insights – Lean Change Management

Resisting the change is a natural reaction, when you don´t involve people affected by the change. Jason Little wrote a book called Lean Change Management, this book shows how to implement successful change through examples of innovative practices that can dramatically improve the success of change programs.

Lean Change Management model consists of 3 parts: Insights, Options and Experiments.

Insights is the first step of the Lean Change Management Model. Insights can be generated from various practices or assessments, like Lean Coffee, Force Field Analysis, or Retrospectives. To read more about these practices click here.

Generating Insights is not easy. People often need a structure, a process to follow. And therefore, Jason suggests that using change management framework is helping people gain an input into a change plan.

Frameworks
Kotter´s Model

Dr. John Kotter wrote a book “Leading Change”, where he describes 8-step process for leading change

Create Urgency – “Urgency for change emerges through honest dialogue between people with different points of view”, Jason states in his book.
Form a Powerful Coalition – this simply means creating a team of change agents that facilitate the change. John Kotter recommends team members to rotate every now and then to bring a fresh perspective.
Create a Vision for the Change – the vision must be specific, measurable, actionable, inspiring and realistic. Think of the vision as a 30-second elevator pitch.
Communicate the Vision – try visualizing your vision, this makes the communication much simpler
Remove Obstacles – when undergoing change, people that are part of it need to feel they are supported. Making problems visible and tracking the issues helps people to see that there is a progress
Create Short Term Wins – this step talks about the risk of people falling back into old habits if they don´t see quick wins. A Kudo wall is a good way to start with.
Build on the Change – when you experience small wins, you can easily intensify their impact
Anchor the Change in Corporate Culture – when people incorporate the changes into their minds, then applying new practices is just a natural way to do it

McKinsey 7S framework

7S framework was created by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman in the 1980s. Peters and Waterman mentioned that if you want to analyze and solve organizational problems, you need to think about more than just the structure. The structure is one of the factors of 7S frame

They classified other six factors: Strategy, Systems, Skills, Style, Staff and Shared values. They divided these into hard and soft factors:

Hard factors: Structure, Strategy, Systems

Soft factors: Skills, Style, Staff, Shared values

If you change one of the seven factors, it will impact the others. You have to then manage those impacts and make appropriate changes to bring all factors into alignment again.

Summary

Kotter´s model provides 8 steps  – a list of ingredients you can use to lead a successful change recipe. Jason in his Lean Change Management book advises to not go through these steps in a linear way, instead, he says to treat them as a guideline. A guideline that helps to direct the messy process.

McKinsey´s 7S model is a powerful framework to construct the dynamic elements of change and anticipate the ripples a change will create.

These frameworks, generally, help you understand how correlated today´s organizations are and what features must be present in your change strategy.

Lean Change Management cycle consists of three parts – Insights, Options and Experiments. Insights is the first step of this model and you can generate Insights by using the above mentioned frameworks.

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Lean Change Management Book: Understanding the current state of the organization

Lean Change Management Book – Understand what makes your organization tick

Resisting the change is a natural reaction, when you don´t involve people affected by the change. Jason Little wrote a book called Lean Change Management, this book shows how to implement successful change through examples of innovative practices that can dramatically improve the success of change programs.

In this blog post, I want to deeply talk about the Insights, the first step of the Lean Change Management Cycle by Jason Little.

Insights is the first step of the Lean Change Management Model, but change has really no logical starting point. Change agents are always stepping in the middle of constantly evolving reality. However, traditional, plan-driven methods presume that change has a logical starting point. The traditional project contains a plan that is created based on organizational insights. By the time the plan is put in practice, the reality has changed, and the plan is no longer up-to-date.

Plans become out-of-date so quickly because there is simply too much emphasis on trying to create a perfect change plan. And as everyone thinks the plan is perfect, then they hit the wall!

It´s important to break down the plan into smaller chunks and releasing those changes slowly to the organization. This approach will reduce confusion caused by introducing too many changes and it helps the adapt the feedback and shape the future changes. This is called a feedback-driven approach.

And this feedback begins at the first step – generating Insights. Insights can be generated from various practices or assessments.

After gathering Insights, you create Options based on different points of view. You can for example consider the differences and similarities between how managers feel about the change.

Sometimes it´s hard to start facilitating the change. You need to get feedback first to do the next step. You will only understand the impact of the changes after you receive feedback.

Practices that generate Insights

Practices are specific processes or actions to generate Insights. There are many change management processes that have their own practices, so you can freely combine any of theses.

Jason Little in his Lean Change Management book is focusing on 5 main practices for generating Insights:

 Information Radiators
Lean Coffee
Culture Hacking
Retrospectives
Force Field Analysis

Information Radiators

Information Radiators is a term initially used by Alistair Cockburn. The Information Radiators are visual management tools and help build trust by making work transparent.

These are simply sticky notes used on a wall. They´re big, easy-to-read, and help everyone understand the complexity of knowledge work. Sticky notes can help manage any level of complexity, not matter how big your project is. You can even visualize work for a 300 person department.

Visualizing work on a wall using sticky notes creates more effective collaboration and cooperation, compared to filing details into a software.

Lean Coffee

Lean Coffee is a perfect way to maximize the communication when there is anger, uncertainty or frustration at stake. Lean Coffee is a Lean approach to running an informal meeting. The participants decide on the agenda, which normally has a certain theme.

A typical set-up of a Lean Coffee session:

The facilitator sets up a Kanban board with 3 columns: To Discuss, Discussing, and Discussed
The facilitator shares the theme. Participants write down questions related to the theme on sticky notes.
All sticky notes are posted on the wall or flip chart to the column “To Discuss”.
The facilitator reads aloud the questions and if necessary, the person who wrote the question can interfere.
Now is a voting time. To decide which topics to talk about first, everyone votes twice. The participants vote by marking the sticky note with a dot. The sticky note that receives the most votes is put into the “Discussing” column. The remaining notes are arranged in the “To Discuss” column based on priority.
Each topic is discussed for 5 minutes. Afterwards, people vote to continue the discussion for another 2 minutes.

Culture Hacking

Culture Hacking, term used by Stefan Haas, is a practice that contains 3 components: the Crack, the Hack, and the Hacking Zones.

The Crack

A Crack is an organizational dysfunction that feels uncomfortable. The Crack creates tension, frustration, or even bad vibes. You can see it as conflicting goas in the organization, false assumptions, or unexpressed feelings that could serve as leverage for the hack.

The Hack

The Hack is the action you take to expose and point out the crack to the organization. It´s a successful intervention that exploits the crack to influence the culture of an organization. You´ve probably experience people saying: “Well, that´s just the way things work around here.”. The Hack is something you do to expose the reality so that people simply see the status quo. By exposing this reality in a polite way, you´ll open their eyes and make them aware of the dysfunction.

Hacking Zones

Hacks have 3 hacking zones:

Green Zone (Safe): These are gentle warnings that will help an organization become self-aware. They´re the least disruptive.
Blue Zone (Risky): These hacks are risky and can result in the opposite effect you´re trying to achieve.
Red Zone (Dangerous): These hacks are the most disruptive and can lead you to be fired. They can also harm the company.

Agile Retrospectives

Retrospective is a meeting the team has every after Sprint or Iteration. After each sprint the team reflects on what worked well and wha did not, and what needs to be changes.

Retrospectives are a powerful practice for understanding the current situation. Frequent feedback through retrospectives increases communication and transparency.

Force Field Analysis

Force Field Analysis is practice known by Kurt Lewin, a social psychologist and pioneer of organizational psychology and change management.

Force Field Analysis is a great practice to find out what´s working against the change and what is is working to support it. It´s a simple technique that is helpful for making sense of what happens during a change process.

Assessments that generate Insights

Assessments are more formal ways of generating Insights. These assessments provide valuable Insights, but require big data analysis.

There are 3 types of assessments as described in the Lean Change Management book:

Prosci ADKAR
OCAI Cultural Assessment
Schneider Culture Model

Prosci ADKAR

It´s one of the most popular change management method, many companies follow it because it´s logical and straightforward.

ADKAR has 2 dimensions – the Business and the People dimension.

The Business dimension has 4 steps:

Business need – business need and opportunity identification
Concept and Design – plan creation for a change process
Implementing – executing the change
Post-implementation – project post-implementation activities

The ADKAR assessment can be a valuable tool for understanding the current situation at the beginning of an organizational change.

OCAI – Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument

The main concept behind OCAI model is the Competing Values Framework. This framework refers to sense-making device that helps leaders understand how to manage the harmony and tension that occur in the organizations.

The OCAI model describes 4 culture typs:

Clan: Internally focused, values flexibility and freedom
Hierarchy: Internally focused, values stability and control
Adhocracy: Externally focused, values flexibility and freedom
Market: Externally focused, values stability and control

Schneider Culture Model

William Schneider, the author of the book “The Re-Engineering Alternative: A Plan for Making Your Current Culture Work”, describes 4 cultures that are similar to OCAI cultures:

Collaboration: “We succeed by working together” (people and reality oriented)
Control: “We succeed by establishing and maintaining control” (company and reality oriented)
Cultivation: “We succeed by growing our people” (people and possibility oriented)
Competence: “We succeed by being the best” (company and reality oriented)

The above mentioned practices and assessments can be used to generate Insights about the current situation in your organization. You just need to learn how to choose the right practice or assessment that´s right for your organization. It can be both fun and challenging. How is it for you, as a change agent?

If you´re interested in attending one of our Lean Change Agent workshops, please visit the training calendar page.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Sources and references:

Lean Change Management book by Jason Little

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