Mike Burrows's Blog, page 42

Some mid-month / pre-weekend announcements

Quite a lot happening that won’t wait for the usual end-of-month roundup:

Super early bird for Lean-Agile Strategy Days London (II) (Agendashift + Lean Strategy Deployment workshop) expires this coming Tuesday (the 17th)
Early bird for the Agendashift practitioner’s workshop, Cape Town (November 8th, ahead of the Regional Scrum Gathering) expires Sunday 22nd. If you’re attending the conference or are a Scrum Alliance member, ping me for a special 20% discount code
On Friday 27th, Webinar: Agendashift Debrief (15:00IST / 10:30UKT / 11:30CET) – a great way to find out what the Agendashift workshops are about. I’ll be presenting the outputs of my most recent workshop in Bengaluru last month.

I’m greatly looking forward to all three: my collaboration with Karl is something I value very highly, the Cape Town event will be the first practitioner workshop south of the equator, and India was a blast!

While we’re here, look out for a 4th revision of the Agendashift book appearing on Monday. If you have it already or you buy it today or over the weekend you’ll be notified via Leanpub (updates are free) and there’ll be a blog post too. You can sample the latest intro and first chapter now by request (PDF only – not via Leanpub for other formats until the complete book is updated).

Have a great weekend!

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Published on October 13, 2017 07:35

Lean and Agile origin stories

From the comments on last week’s Agile and Lean are just toolkits, right?:

Regarding “respect for how these different schools came into being” do you have any thoughts on how to do this? Besides being there at the creation or talking 1-1 with the creators what else is there? There is very little documentation…

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Published on October 07, 2017 00:18

Because every framework needs a poster…

I’ve posted a few teasers in various places over the past few weeks, but now I have a poster I’m pretty happy with and the opportunity to refresh some key pages on the main site.

[image error] Because every framework needs a poster…

Check out the new pages! Visit:

About
Resources
Poster
Home

As always, feedback very welcome. I’m grateful to partners Martien van Steenbergen, Dieter Strasser, and Steven Mackenzie for theirs.

Related:

Lean-Agile transformation as Lean-Agile process

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Published on October 05, 2017 03:12

Agile and Lean are just toolkits, right?

Agile, Lean, Kanban, Scrum, SAFe, … plenty of tools to choose from, so why does ‘toolkit’ set my teeth on edge? Perhaps it puts me in mind of the journeyman worker who knows his tools but never really excels at anything.

To be more than a mere journeyman and to progress towards mastery, you need to know more than just the distinguishing features of each tool or body of knowledge. If I were looking for expert advice or inspiration I’d want to see:

Some respect for how these different schools came into being, the conditions prevailing at the time, the problems being solved
An understanding of the values and principles that explain their design choices and implementation strategies (and I don’t mean just being able to parrot them; values in isolation of practice are meaningless)
An ability to describe their ‘lessons’ – key takeaways that you can apply non-prescriptively, perhaps using alternative tools

Some examples of these lessons:

From Agile: the power of working collaboratively in carefully controlled chunks goes way beyond what you’d learn from studying psychology or queuing theory separately. It’s not magic (it’s easy enough to explain technically and it’s not hard to bring about) and there’s a positive reinforcement feedback loop there, one in which success breeds greater success.
From Lean Startup and Kanban (bedfellows almost from their respective beginnings): make the processes by which you learn about your customers, your product, and yourselves as visible as you can make them. You make rapid progress by continually testing your assumptions about all three.
From Scrum: don’t underestimate the value of rhythm. It’s not just the ritual and the predictability, it’s also the opportunities to achieve something meaningful in between (see lessons 1 and 2)

I’d love to see more of these. Can you describe a ‘lesson’ non-prescriptively?

Related:

Scrum and Kanban revisited
(Non-)Prescription, frameworks, and expertise

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Published on October 02, 2017 23:43

Agendashift roundup, September 2017

In this edition: Launch anniversary; India trip; Public workshops; Speaking; Top posts

Launch anniversary

As mentioned in last month’s roundup, September 14th was the first anniversary of our public launch. Here’s the post made on the day:

Agendashift is 1 today

Since the 14th we’ve added Switzerland to the list of countries represented by our partners, and additional partners in the UK and Austria. In the next few days we’ll add Ukraine and Australia too. That’s every continent now except Antarctica!

India trip

This month I made by fourth trip to India, and definitely my most enjoyable and productive trip of all. While there I published the slides for my keynote at Lean Kanban India 2017:

My #lkin17 keynote “Managing change in the 21st century: what we know and where we must do better”

Also a blog post about communication and scaling:

A quick post from #lkin17 – Synchronous vs asynchronous: which is better?

With Patrick Steyaert we ran a 2-day workshop covering both Flowlab and Agendashift. Among the participants were 4 Agendashift partners (Irshad Nizami, Sanjay Kumar, Alper Tonga and of course Patrick). The Flowlab day was stimulating, and the Agendashift day gets better with every iteration.

In October our hosts Innovation Roots are kindly hosting a webinar in which I’ll walk through the Agendashift workshop via the outputs we produced. Sign up here:

October 27th: Webinar: Agendashift Debrief (15:00IST / 10:30UKT / 11:30CET)

Public workshops

8th November, Cape Town, South Africa: Agendashift practitioner’s workshop

– Quite possibly the first full Agendashift workshop to take place in the Southern Hemisphere, and it’s happening before the regional Scrum Gathering on the 9th and 10th, at which I’m a keynote speaker.
22nd & 23rd November, London: Lean-Agile Strategy Days London (II)

– Not a repeat because we’ve improved it! This is Karl Scotland and I joining forces again for two days of Agendashift and Lean Strategy Deployment goodness.

I’ve moved the Cape Town event from the Eventbrite ticketing platform to Goeventz, which allows it to be priced in ZAR (previously USD).

If you’re an Agendashift partner or plan to become one, discounts apply. We’re also happy to discount generously for employees in the government, education, and non-profit/charitable sectors.

Don’t see an event in your part of the world (here, or in our Events calendar)? Then help us organise one! Not only are we happy to cooperate on a commercial basis, we’re tweaking the corporate partner model to make sure that your efforts can be properly recognised.

Speaking

UK, South Africa, and France:

1-3 November, Bristol, UK: Agile in the City, Bristol 2017
9-10 November, Cape Town, South Africa: Scrum Gathering South Africa 2017
22 November, London, UK: Lean IT meetup London kick-off & keynotes
29-30 November, Paris, France: Lean Kanban France 2017

Top posts

Scrum and Kanban revisited (August)
My #lkin17 keynote “Managing change in the 21st century: what we know and where we must do better”
A quick post from #lkin17 – Synchronous vs asynchronous: which is better?
Agendashift in 5 principles (July)
A True North for Lean-Agile? (May)
(Non-)Prescription, frameworks, and expertise (August)

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Published on September 29, 2017 06:58

Cape Town, London and online

Three dates for your diaries:

27th October (15:00IST / 10:30UKT / 11:30CET), online:

Webinar: Agendashift Debrief

– An online tour through the exercises and artifacts produced during the Agendashift day at the Bengaluru Flow Days Workshop last week. If you’re not sure what Agendashift (and in particular its workshops) are about, this is a great way to find out.
8th November, Cape Town, South Africa:

Agendashift practitioner’s workshop

– Quite possibly the first full Agendashift workshop to take place in the Southern Hemisphere, and it’s happening before the regional Scrum Gathering on the 9th and 10th, at which I’m a keynote speaker.
22nd & 23rd November, London:

Lean-Agile Strategy Days London (II)

– Not a repeat because we’ve improved it! This is Karl Scotland and I joining forces again for two days of Agendashift and Lean Strategy Deployment goodness.

Notes:

I’ve moved the Cape Town event from the Eventbrite ticketing platform to Goeventz, which allows it to be priced in ZAR (previously USD).

If you’re an Agendashift partner or plan to become one, discounts apply. We’re also happy to discount generously for employees in the government, education, and non-profit/charitable sectors.

Don’t see an event in your part of the world (here, or in our Events calendar)? Then help us organise one! Not only are we happy to cooperate on a commercial basis, we’re tweaking the corporate partner model to make sure that your efforts can be properly recognised.

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Published on September 25, 2017 04:01

My #lkin17 keynote “Managing change in the 21st century: what we know and where we must do better”

[Update: added reference to On not teaching PDCA]

Slides from this morning’s keynote at Lean Kanban India 2017 (scroll down below the slides for related info):

Related resources (most of them free) here:

www.agendashift.com/resources

References and recommended reading (including of course my two books):

www.agendashift.com/reading

Related posts, further detail on some of the content:

A True North for Lean-Agile?
Agendashift in 5 principles
Revisions to the book and cue cards
Lean-Agile transformation as Lean-Agile process
Agendashift as coaching framework
On not teaching PDCA

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Published on September 15, 2017 21:33

A quick post from #lkin17 – Synchronous vs asynchronous: which is better?

A quick mid-conference post from Bengaluru and Lean Kanban India 2017. This morning I gave a repeat what I thought was a one-off talk, the provocatively titled “Scaling without cross-functional teams”, a title set me as a challenge by the organisers of Øredev 2016 (video of that original session below).

Scaling without cross-functional teams from Øredev Conference on Vimeo.

A nice little paradox occurred to me as I was wrapping up today’s talk: systems are often more performant, more robust, and more manageable when they communicate asynchronously, and yet Agile is founded on collaboration and therefore highly dependent on synchronous forms of communication. We want people to be working with each other, talking to each other, face-to-face if possible.

Which is better? Synchronous or asynchronous? Of course neither one is intrinsically better; it’s important to understand the costs and benefits of both in context and choose appropriately. Often a mix of styles is required:

People working mostly independently (communicating only as required) or in pairs (communicating all the time); the team comes together daily to synchronise.
As work items change status, it is signalled on the board (allowing an asynchronous response). Key events such as planning and deployment bring people together to coordinate and may cause multiple work items to move in tandem.
Communications arising from things happening outside the team generally arrive unpredictably. Mostly of the time, the team responds only when ready, if indeed it needs to respond at all. Similarly, the team will from time to time issue announcements or requests without any reliable expectation of how they will be responded to (if at all). Whatever the direction of the communication, some situations will require a synchronised response (eg a meeting) when (say) email is no longer the appropriate medium.
Typically, well-engineered business applications can started, stopped, and upgraded at will, independently of other systems. The ability to do so makes them much more manageable and enables a significantly faster rate of change. This isn’t just a technology issue; it also requires people to deal appropriately with those cases in which it seems that multiple systems must be upgraded together because guarantees of backward and forward compatibility will be broken. With good architectures and a degree of proactivity and forethought however, these situations (dependencies) can often be managed away painlessly behind the scenes.

If there’s a general principle here, it’s that synchronisation is a good default at small scale (eg pairing, standup meetings) but that asynchronous communication soon becomes the more efficient default as systems get larger, beyond the size of a single team or application component. Self-organisation is possible at these larger scales; even 20 years ago I was working in environments that could roll out changes affecting multiple systems, multiple sponsors, dozens of people, billions (yes billions) of dollars worth of business, and not a single project manager in sight. It can work!

We have a name for large-scale systems that rely significantly on large-scale synchronisation, featuring combinations of coordinated releases, management approvals, stage gates, complex schedules, frequent large meetings, and large documents that few people want to read: the word is heavyweight. Yes that’s a loaded term (pun 100% intended), but I would only choose to engineer a heavyweight system of any kind (process or application) if I were sure that the alternatives were worse. As far as I can recall, I don’t think that has ever happened. There are usually faster, cheaper, higher quality, and more humane ways of getting things done, even at scale.

See also: A True North for Lean-Agile?

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Published on September 15, 2017 06:41

Agendashift is 1 today

Exactly one year ago today, Agendashift had its public launch. We went live with 22 partners signed up, each of them licensed to 1) use our unique online assessment tool, 2) use our workshop material, and 3) claim a spot in the Agendashift partner directory.

In those 12 months we have grown nearly threefold to 60 partners in 18 countries – 21 in the UK, 13 in the US, 4 in Germany, 3 each in France, India, and Sweden, 2 in Belgium, and 1 each in Argentina, Austria, Canada, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, and Turkey. That’s quite a spread!

Since the first public workshop in Leeds, the tools and materials have undergone frequent revision, thanks in no small part to the input of partners and workshop participants. I myself will be taking the workshop outside Europe more often, visiting India, South Africa, and (very likely) the US in the coming months.

Then came the book. Agendashift has been a very different experience to my first book, Kanban from the Inside. Instead of rushing to get it into print, I released a completed part I online on Leanpub in May, expecting it to lurk there quietly while I got on with part II. Of course it didn’t quite work out that way – I’ve since published 3 revisions and I don’t promise that they’ll be the last, such is the ease by which they can now be done. And when it does go to print, Part I may well become Book 1.

I have more unfinished business in the area of machine learning. Back in June I announced the Agendashift unbenchmarking service, which uses so-called unsupervised learning techniques to help identify particular points of interest in survey results. I have since been experimenting with clustering – techniques that won’t just enhance the analytics, they will also create opportunities to connect people. eHarmony for Lean-Agile, if you like!

There have been a couple of surprises. The first is just how comfortably Clean Language and Cynefin have integrated themselves into Agendashift’s distinctively outcome-centric approach to transformation, to the extent that it’s now hard to imagine their absence. They compliment each other very well: our Clean Language-based workshop game ‘15-minute FOTO’ generates narrative fragments in the form of outcomes that are ideally suited to further interaction via the Cynefin four points contextualisation exercise. Furthermore, they both have wider impact, Clean Language in helping us minimise unhelpful assumptions and opening the door to valuable things that we practitioners might easily exclude, and Cynefin for allowing us to acknowledge the limits of some of our tools (which, ironically, makes them stronger).

The other surprise shouldn’t have been a surprise at all, the way that interacting with other people (many of whom I would have met were it not for Agendashift) has been so rewarding. In every respect that Agendashift has grown, it has grown through interaction. And overwhelmingly, those interactions have been a pleasure to participate in or even simply to observe. If you’ve been part of it, I want to thank you.

About Agendashift™

Agendashift is a modern, inclusive, non-prescriptive, and outcome-centric approach to organisational transformation. Notwithstanding its roots in Lean-Agile, Agendashift remains framework-neutral by intent and design. It is delivered via an online assessment/analytics tool, hands-on workshops, and follow-on coaching and technical training as needed. It is used both inside and outside of IT and across diverse industries, both technology-centric and otherwise.

Agendashift is brought to you by Positive Incline Ltd, UK-based specialists in Lean-Agile transformation. Founder Mike Burrows pioneered the values model for the Kanban Method that led to his definitive book, Kanban from the Inside (2014, Blue Hole Press). Part I of his new book Agendashift: clean conversations, coherent collaboration, continuous transformation was published May 2017.

For further information, download our 4-page overview or get in touch.

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Published on September 14, 2017 03:14

Announcing corporate and associate partnerships

With just a week to go until the first anniversary of our launch, I’m delighted to announce Agendashift’s new corporate partnership plan. This is designed to meet the needs of a range of current and potential Agendashift users:

Service providers (eg consultancies, Agile coaching companies, or looser collectives) with multiple Lean-Agile practitioners and a shared corporate identity
Single-person (or larger) service operations who encourage their clients to use Agendashift under their own steam, as a help along their road to self-sufficiency
End user organisations managing their own Lean-Agile journey internally, with some internal coaching capability

Corporate Agendashift partnerships come with:

Two full partner memberships, ie two named individuals, fully onboarded
25% discounts on additional full partners, onboarded by us or your existing partners
50% discounts on associate partners, onboarded by you
The option for your corporate logo to appear on our home page, linked to the page of your choice

Once onboarded, full and associate partners have unrestricted access to the online tools (we don’t charge for usage) and are licensed to use our workshop materials. We include a free copy of the Agendashift book, even refunding existing purchases. Full partners have the option to be listed in the Agendashift partner directory and have their own private channel in the Agendashift Slack.

Pricing

Corporate Agendashift partnerships start at the annual cost of two full individual partners, or just £550 per year. Then £205 per year for additional full partners and £137 for associates. Single-person operations become eligible for corporate partnership after recruiting two clients as associate partners, the overall cost being the same.

We offer deep discounts on a country basis (eg 60% off for India) and to charitable, non-profit, educational, and public-sector organisations.

All of the above prices are reduced by £50 for the first year for each partner who has attended one of our Agendashift practitioner’s workshops (whether public or private).

Payment options:

1 year in advance
2 years in advance, 20% discount
3 years in advance, 30% discount

After the first year, a monthly payment option is available at a small premium.

Not ready for corporate partnership?

Three lower-commitment options:

1. The Agendashift™ unbenchmarking service

A different kind of assessment with unique, machine-assisted analysis. This is not the lazy consultant’s way of telling you that you’re not using their favourite practices; neither is it “everyone else is better than you” (they aren’t) or “you’re doing it wrong” (we’re not here to judge). It’s there to help you find a way forward from where you are now, wherever that happens to be.

2. Check out the free trial

For free, create your own Agendashift surveys for use with individuals or small groups. You’ll have access to the 18-prompt “mini edition” assessment template, which is available in English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Dutch, Spanish, and Greek.

Some limitations apply:

You won’t have access to the full 43-prompt Values-based delivery assessment template or its corresponding ‘pathway’ template
Your surveys will be limited to a maximum of 10 participants each
Your surveys will all be filed under a single ‘Free trial’ context that you won’t be able to rename

3. Join the authorised partner programme as an individual:

Full access to the the Agendashift tools, facilitation materials, and more:

Create your own contexts and surveys with our full range of assessment templates
Use them in one-to-one, team, or organisational settings
Analyse survey results, with full control over when you share them with participants
Facilitate your own Agendashift transformation mapping workshops and coaching sessions using our latest materials
Get listed in our partner directory (if you wish – your listing is under your control)

Read the small print: Partner licence agreement.

About Agendashift™

Agendashift is a modern, inclusive, non-prescriptive, and outcome-centric approach to organisational transformation. Notwithstanding its roots in Lean-Agile, Agendashift remains framework-neutral by intent and design. It is delivered via an online assessment/analytics tool, hands-on workshops, and follow-on coaching and technical training as needed. It is used both inside and outside of IT and across diverse industries, both technology-centric and otherwise.

Agendashift is brought to you by Positive Incline Ltd, UK-based specialists in Lean-Agile transformation. Founder Mike Burrows pioneered the values model for the Kanban Method that led to his definitive book, Kanban from the Inside (2014, Blue Hole Press). Part I of his new book Agendashift: clean conversations, coherent collaboration, continuous transformation was published May 2017.

For further information, download our 4-page overview or get in touch.