We know process doesn’t matter if your organization isn’t aligned to your customers and markets. Most large-scale organizations aren’t aligned in this way.

We also know that the Agile Manifesto says, “We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.”

In this episode of Agile Unplugged with LeadingAgile CEO Mike Cottmeyer and guest COO Chris Beale, they explore how LeadingAgile is using this same idea for our approach to Agile Transformation—uncovering better ways of doing Agile Transformation by doing it and helping others do it. We call this Organizations to Summits. Mike and Chris discuss what Organizations to Summits involves and expand on its underpinnings along with how we use it to help the large organizations we work with.

Chris and Mike will dive deep into the specifics of what we’ve learned during our journey guiding large organizations to a place where their systems and capacities are aligned with their markets and customers.

Remember to subscribe and listen to Agile Unplugged on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Podbean—and watch each and every episode on YouTube, IGTV, and Facebook.

Also, don’t miss out on this year’s most important Agile event. Get your tickets early to join us Elevate Agile—a one-day event bringing together the Leaders of Business Agility to elevate the topics of Agile Transformation and Business Agility beyond the realm of practices.

Check out the lineup and get tickets today. Use code ELEVATE30 to get 30% off at checkout.

This week in SoundNotes our focus is Design Thinking. If you are a Product Owner and Design Thinking is not part of your toolbox you need to listen to this podcast. This is the first in what will be a series of interviews centered around Design Thinking, how it works and why it is a critical element of the work of anyone serving in a Product Owner or Product Management role.

Angela Peat and Derek Poppink join Dave in this episode to talk all about Design Thinking. By the end of the interview, you’ll know where it comes from, the value it provides, how it aligns with agile practices, and where you can go to start learning more about how to make it part of your approach to work.

Additional Resources on Design Thinking

• Stanford Design School: https://dschool.stanford.edu
• Ideo Design Thinking: https://designthinking.ideo.com
• Design Thinking at InteractionDesign.org: https://bit.ly/3xaeBN6
• Range by David Epstein: https://amzn.to/2UEpFVy

Contacting Angela Peat

• LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/angela-peat/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angela-peat/

Contacting Derek Poppink

• LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/derek-poppink/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpoppink/

Contacting Dave Prior

• LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrsungo
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/mrsungo
• Email: dave.prior@leadingagile.com

If you have a question you’d like to submit for an upcoming podcast, please send them to dave.prior@leadingagile.com

And if you’re interested in taking one of our upcoming Certified ScrumMaster or Certified Scrum Product Owner classes, you can find all the details at https://www.leadingagile.com/our-gear/training/

Business now moves faster than ever. Some call it market speed, others call it Business Agility. But if your company can’t deliver an ever-evolving set of customer-facing, customer-satisfying functions that support the core mission of the company, someone else is working hard to make sure that they can.

And how is management looking at the world? Through metrics that tell you what happened in the past. The past year, quarter, even month. These numbers are too late. The functional pillars of your organizations are struggling. And culture changes aren’t going to make a difference. Here’s what does:

• Structural changes that deliberately link organizations to what is delivered to customers.
• Agile development processes that are laser focused on customer value.
• Organizational alignment tools that work from the top down (and yes, feeds back ideas, too).
• Metrics that matter: the few key numbers that make sure everyone knows where they are and how far along they are in achieving their goals. And that add up to companies delivering on their goals.

We should all be talking about how to structure organizations, with real constraints, in such a way that they’re able to unlock the benefits of Agile. At the end of the day, the System of Delivery you choose doesn’t really matter, what matters is creating a System of Transformation that enables that System of Delivery.

So, why aren’t more people applying Agile in this context? Well, because it’s hard.

It’s much easier to sell you a bill of goods, come in and do some hand-waving, throw some sticky notes on a wall, and dub your organization Transformed than it is to walk into a room full of executives and discuss how you’re going to incrementally build the capability to be Agile within their organization.

This is our opportunity to flip the conversation and bring the topics of real, sustainable Agile Transformation and achieving true Business Agility to the forefront.

That’s why we’re introducing the Elevate Agile Conference.

What’s the Goal?

Elevate Agile is a one-day event that’s dedicated to elevating the topics of Agile Transformation and Business Agility beyond the realm of practices and bringing together the Leaders of Business Agility who have been charged with navigating the complexity of enterprise Transformation.

The goal is to thrust Agile Transformation into the same light as digital transformation, product and service enablement, business model transformation, digital customer & employee experience, and operations improvement in an effort to promote Agile as a first-tier solution to the business problems that large, complex organizations are facing.

Is Elevate Agile For Me? 

Rather, Elevate Agile is for Transformation leaders looking to connect the dots between methodology and better business outcomes. It’s for those of you who are passionate about leading change in large, complex enterprise environments and who are focused on the business results that stem from Transformation.

So, if you’re new to Agile, this probably isn’t the conference for you. There won’t be any Agile 101 tracks or Sprint Planning workshops, and you won’t learn how to run a better daily standup.

Check out the speaker lineup and get your tickets today.

Use the code ELEVATE30 to get 30% off at checkout.

Habit 5:  Seek First To Understand, Then To Be Understood 

We are 4 down and 3 to go in our exploration of Stephen R. Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, with regard to effective Agile Transformation. Our focus this time is Habit 5 – Seek First To Understand, Then To Be Understood. Quite frankly, Habit 5 is the answer to Habit 4 – Think Win/Win or rather, seeking first to understand makes Win/Win possible.   

Habit 5 centers around the highest form of listening, what is referred to as “empathic listening.” With this Habit, Covey challenges us to develop the powerful skill of empathetic listening to first diagnose, seek to deeply understand, before prescribing a fix to the problem.   

A Paradigm Shift

Empathetic listening involves a significant paradigm shift. For most, we seek first to be understood and not to understand.  We listen through our own paradigms with the intent to reply and are either speaking or preparing to speak. When we listen, we may pretend to listen, do selective listening, attempt to be attentive, or even all together ignore. Furthermore, keep in mind that empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy is a form of agreement. Empathy is understanding. You don’t have to agree with someone to understand them. 

With empathic listening, you are listening with your whole self; it’s not just your ears hearing the words. Your eyes see their body language and behavior and your heart senses the meaning and feelings behind their words.   

We’d all agree that communication is probably one of the most important life skills, however, you can’t be an effective communicator with technique alone. You must develop the skills of empathetic listening. As Covey points out, while we all learned to read and write over many years of school, there was little to no focus on empathetic listening or listening with the intent to deeply understand.   

Allowing For Basic Human Needs

Covey introduces the concept of “psychological air” pointing out that, after physical survival, our greatest human need is psychological survival or the need to be understood, affirmed, validated, and appreciated. 

“When you listen with empathy to another person, you give that person psychological air. And after that vital need is met, you can then focus on influencing and problem solving.” 

So, what gets in the way of us giving someone psychological air? While this seems simple enough, we often rush to fix the problem. We tend to respond from our own perspective by evaluating, probing, advising, or interpreting rather than seeking to deeply understand.   

Toward providing psychological air, Covey offers four developmental stages of empathetic listening: 

• Stage 1 – Mimic Content:  Simply listen and repeat the words back. It’s the first step towards empathetic listening, however, the least effective alone. 
• Stage 2 – Rephrase the Content:  Put what you heard into your own words. This is slightly more effective but still limited. 
• Stage 3 – Reflect Feeling:  Listen (and sense) for feelings and reflect them back.  
• Stage 4 – Rephrase the Content & Reflect Feeling:  A combination of stages 2 and 3 is considered most effective. Put the content in your own words AND reflect back the feelings you sensed. 

Stage 4 is the greatest form of empathetic listening where you sincerely seek to understand, ultimately giving the person the psychological air they need. And, from that human connection that is made, comes trust and influence. On this topic of trust and influence, I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you to check out the perceptive work that LeadingAgile has done with the Trust Influence Loop, a model for building and maintaining a strong partnership with our clients throughout their Transformation.  

Habit 5 is what I like to think of as easier said than done. Empathetic listening is easy to say, but not so easy to do. Covey reminds us that it takes an investment of time, however, when done right, empathetic listening can produce the greatest returns. 

Toward Influencing Change

Covey declares, “…in order to have influence, you have to be influenced.” To influence others, you must first show that you can be influenced.  This is where empathic listening comes in.  When you open yourself up to being influenced, you are vulnerable and there is some inherent risk in that.  However, on the upside, you may learn a thing or two that will lead to you ultimately being understood.  Or rather, once you understand, you can seek to be understood.   

Therein lies the nugget of gold that leads us back to effective Agile Transformation. We’ve talked about how an Agile Transformation is a massive exercise in change management. To change someone or something, as in an Agile Transformation, you must be able to influence them. This goes for the consultants working from the outside-in as well as the change champions working from the inside-out, bottom-up, or top-down.   

You can’t dictate, mandate, or even prescribe an Agile Transformation and there is certainly nothing one-size-fits-all about it, though some may have you believe otherwise. You must first hear their woes and see their pains and give them that psychological air that they so desire. An Agile Transformation must be influenced, carefully and gently. And, emphatic listening, seeking first to understand the people and the organization, is key. Covey even refers to this as turning a “transactional opportunity” into a “transformational opportunity.” As he points out, this act of diagnosing before you prescribe, is the mark of a true professional, be it the doctor, the mechanic, the Agile Transformation consultant, or the change champion. 

Next Up

With Habit 5 – Seek First To Understand, Then To Be Understood, we focused on the key life skill of empathetic listening and learned just what it takes to get to Win/Win as part of Habit 4.  As a reminder, Habits 1 through 3 had us Be Proactive, Begin With The End In Mind, and Put First Things First. Toward an effective Agile Transformation, we now know that a proactive organization (Habit 1) with a solid end state vision (Habit 2) that focuses on what’s important (Habit 3) can get to Win/Win (Habit 4) by seeking first to understand (Habit 5). Next up, we will explore Habit 6 – Synergize. It’s not just a buzzword anymore! 

“We forgot … we forgot to request… we forgot to request the subdomain level domain, and that lead time for DNS propagation is at least 48 hours, can someone tell marketing we can’t launch this tomorrow?”

It’s a simple oversight, forgetting something. Building software is a complex thing, prone to mistakes. In my own career as a developer, mistake to mistake, commit to revert. If only there was a checklist, something that could remind of what is necessary to be successful, something that could remind us of the important things, because we will forget.

Let’s review some basic facts to get everyone aligned.

1. When work is Ready, it means we can engage upon it with high confidence it will be delivered, and if it is not delivered – we already forecasted the constraint.
2. When work is done it means the work is complete.
3. The Definition of Ready and Done are two checklists control how the team commits and delivers work.
4. If work is not predictably getting to done, you’re probably not ready, yet.

In practice, the Definition of Ready must contain all the things that have hurt you in the past or could hurt you in the future. These items must be solved for before the work begins.

Outside of scheduling, the Definition of Ready is backlog refinement; hence, making things Ready. There are many activities a team can do to make the work Ready, but all activities should end with the Definition of Ready being completely checked.

If it takes much time to make things ready, that is an organizational challenge – it illustrates the complexity in the organization.  A complex process requires a complex checklist.  And when this checklist is recorded, used, and visible, it can be shared with the leadership when they ask, “How can I help? Or “What is it taking so long?”

The Definition of Done describes the target state. It must be informed by the Definition of Ready. It’s that simple. The anti-pattern adopted by most teams is to neglect either. Here are some examples to help you on your journey.

Here’s a list of some important things to consider when assessing your readiness. 

As vaccination rates rise and the number of people infected with Covid-19 drops our world is slowly moving on to some new form of normal. Many of us have returned, or soon will be returning, to the office. After a year working from home, that shift back to the thing that was once part of our every day work lives, is going to present unique challenges for each of us. Some have been champing at the bit, waiting to get back to a busy social IRL work atmosphere. Others discovered that working from home actually provided greater productivity and comfort. No matter how you reacted to the pandemic lock-down, returning to the office is gonna be a little weird.

In this episode of the podcast, LeadingAgile Executive Coach/Clinical Psychologist, Dr. Kelly Lingerfeldt joins Dave to talk about returning to the office, the challenges that will present for each of us, and different strategies we can use to cope with getting out from behind the Zoom camera, swapping our sweat pants for actual pants and going into the office.

Dr. Kelly Lingerfeldt’s book on Amazon

Drivetime Stories: Making the Most of Moments on the Go https://amzn.to/36hPzAi

Contacting Dr. Kelly Lingerfeldt

• Web: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dr-kelly-lingerfeldt/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-kelly-lingerfeldt-95227074/

Contacting Dave Prior

• LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrsungo
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/mrsungo
• Email: dave.prior@leadingagile.com

If you have a question you’d like to submit for an upcoming podcast, please send them to dave.prior@leadingagile.com

And if you’re interested in taking one of our upcoming Certified ScrumMaster or Certified Scrum Product Owner classes, you can find all the details at https://www.leadingagile.com/our-gear/training/

We are at the midway point in our Agile Transformation-focused exploration of Stephen R. Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” with Habit 4 – Think Win/Win. I’m sure we’ve all said it in business and even relationships, but how does Covey intend it towards being highly effective and what does it mean to an Agile Transformation?

Before we explore the answer to that question, it seems appropriate for a quick refresher on the first three habits. Habit 1 – Be Proactive, and Habit 2 – Begin With The End In Mind ultimately enable Habit 3 – Put First Things First. In terms of what we’re here to talk about, an organization that is proactive (Habit 1) with an end state vision (Habit 2) and realizes it through a focus on what’s most important (Habit 3), is well on their way towards effective Agile Transformation. With that, let’s now consider Habit 4 – Think Win/Win.

FROM independence to INTERDEPENDENCE

As we venture into Habit 4, we are moving on from what Covey refers to as Private Victories, characterized by independence, into the habits of Public Victories, characterized by interdependence or success in working with other people. Covey is clear on the fact that effective interdependence can only be achieved by truly independent people:

“As we become independent – proactive, centered in correct principles, value driven and able to organize and execute around the priorities in our life with integrity – we then can choose to become interdependent – capable of building rich, enduring, highly productive relationships with other people.”

With that in mind, Habits 1 through 3 are essentially prerequisite to Habit 4 and thus begins our look outward, rather than inward. The focus now being on interdependence or our relationships with people.

You may recall that Covey introduces the P/PC Balance concept early in the book using the goose and the golden egg metaphor, where the golden egg is the Production (P) of desired results and the goose is the Production Capability (PC). I find the P/PC Balance particularly relevant now as we get into the interdependent habits.

Covey suggests that every P problem is a PC opportunity as it’s a matter of interdependence. Simply put, if you want the goose to continue to produce golden eggs, you must continually invest in that relationship. Or, in Covey’s own words, “By recognizing that the P/PC balance is necessary to effectiveness in an interdependent reality, we can value our problems as opportunities to increase PC.”

Effective Interpersonal Leadership

Every company all over the world has one thing in common, people. Companies are made up of people, people interacting with people, people working to serve customers that are people, and people partnering with the people of other companies. You’ve heard it time and time again, the massive change management undertaking that is an Agile Transformation is all about people. Think Win/Win is the habit of effective interpersonal leadership needed to move whole organizations of people towards effective Agile Transformation.

Win/Win in effective interpersonal leadership is constantly seeking mutual benefit and finding synergies. Covey explains that this is a belief that there is a better way, a Third Alternative, and not your way or my way. However, if Win/Win isn’t possible then No Deal, or agreeing to disagree agreeably, can be a freeing option.

There are other paradigms of human interaction – Win/Lose, Lose/Win, Lose/Lose, and Win – that may have their time and place, however, not in the interdependent reality we find ourselves in. Per Covey, Win/Win is really the only viable alternative. He finds that, “Anything less than Win/Win in an interdependent reality is a poor second best that will have impact in the long-term relationship.”

Five interdependent dimensions of life contribute to effective interpersonal leadership that is Win/Win: 1) Character, 2) Relationships, 3) Agreements, 4) Systems, and 5) Process. Character is the foundation of Win/Win and characterized by integrity, maturity, and an abundance mentality. From the foundation of character, we build and maintain Win/Win Relationships with high levels of trust. From those relationships flow the Agreements, with a focus on results over methods. The right structure and Systems are needed for Win/Win to survive in an organization with the right Process to support it, matching the means to the ends.

A brief word on Systems as this rings true to my belief about how to effectively accomplish an Agile Transformation and, ultimately, the LeadingAgile way. Covey states that, “Win/Win can only survive in an organization when the systems support it.” This is essentially LeadingAgile’s Systems-first hypothesis. This hypothesis asserts that given The 3 Things that comprise an Agile Transformation – Systems, Practices, and Culture – an organization must first put the right Systems in place – Structure, Governance, and Metrics (yet another 3 things) – and then apply Practices and Culture will emerge.

If you haven’t read up on The 3 Things or heard Mike Cottmeyer, our CEO, talk about them, you are missing out on the answers to all things in life (maybe I’m exaggerating some, but I do find that most work problems can be solved with The 3 Things).

Cooperation over Competition

The change management needed for an effective Agile Transformation, one that accomplishes better business outcomes, must be based in Win/Win or it is doomed to fail. Win/Win is cooperation, not competition. Covey states that, “…cooperation in the workplace is as important to free enterprise as competition in the marketplace.” The truth to that seems obvious, however, is all too frequently not the case.

In my (Agile) years of experience, I’ve found that Win/Win is created when there is, what I call, the Perfect Storm of top-down and bottom-up support for an Agile Transformation. That is, both leadership at the top and the teams at the bottom, can see their win; there is no loser and the mutual benefit to both parties is clear, agreed, and accepted. They are cooperating to win, not competing to win. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of Win/Lose and Lose/Win, and sometimes even Lose/Lose, going on with agile transformations nowadays. Take for instance when leadership inflicts agile on its people in an attempt to fix them. In this case, morale takes a big hit as people become bitter and disengaged and the whole thing falls apart or, even worse, leads to greater dysfunction. Or, consider when the teams go rogue with grassroots-style Agile, assuming leadership will come along for the ride, without consideration for the needs of the business or what leadership really wants to get out of it.

The Perfect Storm isn’t always present. Take it from me, they don’t all start with the rainbows and butterflies of aligned interests and agreed direction. That’s where the work comes in for Agile Transformationists, such as you and I, to embody Habit 4 and Think Win/Win towards an effective Agile Transformation where everyone is a winner and there are no losers.

NEXT UP

Habits 1 through 3 – Be Proactive, Begin With The End In Mind, and Put First Things First – were all about independence, or looking inward. This time we explored the paradigm of interdependence and turned our focus outward with Habit 4 – Think Win/Win. Stringing it all together, we’ve learned that a proactive organization (Habit 1) with a mission-focused end state vision (Habit 2) that focuses on what’s most important first (Habit 3) and embodies the principle of Win/Win (Habit 4), makes way for an effective Agile Transformation.

Next up, we’ll explore what Covey intends with Habit 5 – Seek First To Understand, Then To Be Understood and how it relates to Agile Transformation.

Earlier this year LeadingAgile was contacted by GC Uttam who expressed an interest in taking Certified Scrum Master training. Uttam wanted to learn how he could use Agile practices within his organization to provide better support for the Nepalese orphans and widows they serve.

LeadingAgile believes strongly in giving back. And whenever we can we provide open seats in our classes to those whose work is to serve others. We offered Uttam a seat and agreed to check back a few months after class to see how he’d been able to put what he learned to use. During the interview, Uttam and Dave talk about how he has introduced some of the key principles and values from Agile back to his teams and the people they serve. You’ll also hear about how they’ve begun using Scrum to run marketing experiments in their ministry work.

Links

• Web: www.gcministries.net
• Hope Home Nepal www.hopehomenepal.org

Contacting Uttam

• Email: uttamgc@gmail.com

Contacting Dave Prior

• LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrsungo
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/mrsungo
• Email: dave.prior@leadingagile.com

If you have a question you’d like to submit for an upcoming podcast, please send them to dave.prior@leadingagile.com

And if you’re interested in taking one of our upcoming Certified ScrumMaster or Certified Scrum Product Owner classes, you can find all the details at https://www.leadingagile.com/our-gear/training/

Transcript

Dave Prior:
Hi, this is Dave Prior from LeadingAgile SoundNotes. The podcast you’re about to listen to is a little different than the ones we usually post. At LeadingAgile we believe it’s our responsibility to find ways to give back and to support those who make that the primary focus of their work. One of the ways that we do this is by providing discounted and free seats in our classes to those who serve others. We’ve done this for hospital workers, nonprofit organizations, frontline workers, and other folks who spend their days providing support for others.

Dave Prior:
My guest on this episode of SoundNotes is someone who reached out to us about taking a certified Scrum master course, and when we learned about the work he does, we offered him a seat. His contribution to the class impacted everyone in it. Uttam, who you’ll meet in a moment and I agreed to reconnect a few months after he’d completed the class to talk about how he’d been able to use what he learned. In this interview you’re going to hear about the work that Uttam does supporting orphans and widows from Nepal, how he’s been introducing the tools he learned about in class to those he serves and works with on a daily basis, and how his organization has been using Scrum to improve their social media outreach campaign. I hope you enjoy the interview.

Dave Prior:
Welcome to LeadingAgile SoundNotes. I’m Dave Prior. This is going to be a different kind of a podcast. Usually we talk all about LeadingAgile stuff or questions from students in class, but today this is going to be different because I have somebody who’s taken the classes. Uttam, I’m just going to say GC because that’s what he told me to say. So Uttam, thank you for being here.

Uttam:
Thank you so much. It’s my great privilege to be over here with you and to share what I’ve learned so far.

Dave Prior:
So Uttam reached out a while back and explained what he did and asked about the class and we let him take the class. We created a seat for him because of the work that he’s doing and we wanted to try to support that. And so we’re going to talk about what he’s been doing, what he got out of the class and how he’s been able to apply it in the work that he does. So I don’t want to step on the work that you do, so how do you explain to folks about what you spend your days doing?

Uttam:
I’m involved a lot in the community service works and the ministry works, sharing the gospel. We do work also amongst the orphans and widows and poor communities in Nepal as well. Those are some of my major works trying to help these communities and bringing the good news and gospel as well as support them in their works, because they are very, very much in need in different areas and really see their life blossom.

Dave Prior:
Okay. Well, could you talk for a moment just about the orphans in Nepal and a little bit about what kind things they’re dealing with, what their life is like?

Uttam:
Yes. Nepal is an amazing country. This is very interesting because Nepal has gone through a lot of conflict and wars and is kind of a poverty-stricken country. So there are so many kids, children who are orphans and we’re kind of left there and nobody cares for them. So my heart went out for them and we started the orphan homes. Actually we call it Hope Family, and once the teams are brought and given them, the family, the food and the education, total family environment, we call it a family rather than orphanage. And then we try to help them, give them education and give them everything that really helps them to prepare for the better and bright future. I did that also because when I was a young boy, my father died and that was a great motivation for me to serve among the widows and orphans.

Dave Prior:
And you grew up in Nepal?

Uttam:
Yes, I was born and I grew up in Nepal.

Dave Prior:
Okay. And how long have you been in the states?

Uttam:
In the states, it’s been about five years.

Dave Prior:
Okay. Okay. So you got this ministry and you’re going over, you’re helping the people over there, the widows, the orphans, kind of spreading the word as well. And what about here? How does that play out here because you’re in North Carolina, right?

Uttam:
Yes. I have been now working among the Nepalis and now they are in Nepal or globally. They are what we call them diaspora Nepalis too. And then when I’m over here, I actually support the refugees. There is a huge number of refugees from Bhutan. They are Nepali-speaking refugees as well. So my work is also to help them and to support them. And at the same time that I have been very much involved developing social media and technology to use this in order to help the people in Nepal and also Nepalis globally.

Dave Prior:
Okay. And so I know that there’s been a lot of conflict. That’s still ongoing, right?

Uttam:
There was conflict and there were about 17,000 people killed. The Maoist or the communists tried to take over the country. Actually they are kind of ruling the countries even now. And the political system is extremely unstable right now as well. And then also it’s been terribly in a COVID hit right now as well.

Dave Prior:
Yeah. If you look up news for Nepal or Bhutan, I mean all you see is articles about how bad COVID has gotten over there. I can only hope that they can get some relief soon, get some help.

Uttam:
Yes.

Dave Prior:
Okay. So you reached out because you wanted to take the Scrum class and I’m wondering if you can talk for a little bit about how you discovered Agile and what made you interested in taking the Scrum classes?

Uttam:
Yes. I’m always interested about the Scrum method, so when I’m searching and I found LeadingAgile and reached out to you and wanted to learn more about Scrum. You know, because I work with our people groups and I always wondered how I can really best serve and use the resources we have at our best to have the best in output of our works. So I thought this would be an opportunity to learn more about it because I have done my MBA, so I’ve always been familiar with more of a waterfall method, but this one was sort of new for new for me.

Dave Prior:
Okay. And how have you been able to apply this stuff? For those of you who are listening, Scrum comes out of software. You may not be aware of this, but it’s used well beyond that realm now. There are lots of religious organizations like Jeff Sutherland’s wife has used it a lot with church groups and stuff. So I’m curious within the ministry and the work that you’re doing for the widows and the orphans, how has Scrum or any other agile practices been put into play and how has it helped?

Uttam:
Yes. I think that agile, as it says, is a mindset. You know, it’s not so much of the software or any other thing, it really transcends across every sphere of our life, personal life, work life, workplaces, and everywhere. So what have we actually done? We have implemented that even in the orphan homes helping the kids to use the system in order to be able to get better [inaudible 00:07:52] and be more confident. So we have seen that in a personal life, and we’ve seen that in the family life that it’s really made a difference. And we actually see that in our organizations and the community. So I don’t think that it has to be limited to the IT thing, even though that’s been mostly used right now, but this really goes across everything, every area of our life. Because it’s only a mindset like how we really try to be more productive in the world, which is very unpredictable right now, and very complex as well.

Dave Prior:
So this is one thing that I want to just highlight because a lot of people come to the classes and they feel like maybe they’re in a waterfall organization or whatever, they just don’t see an opportunity to use this stuff. Everybody I know who is a coach or trainer or anybody who’s a practitioner of this, they use it all throughout their lives. So even if you don’t have a team you can work with, keeping a backlog, prioritizing the work, planning the work into sprints, doing retrospectives, even if they’re just retrospectives with yourself where you’re exploring what went well, what didn’t go well, what can I learn from that, how can I get better at being able to show up and be there for people. All of these practices can be employed individually, as well as organizationally, to run all kinds of programs.

Dave Prior:
You’ve mentioned you’ve used it with the work that you’re doing. So what is one, I mean beyond the personal use of it, what’s one thing, program, or one story you could share about how you’ve been able to use some of these practices at work?

Uttam:
Yeah. So one of the things that we are doing with the mission right now, we share good news, the gospel, and we are going more in a social media. We are trying to use social media to reach the mass of people all over the world, especially among the Nepalis. So we use this method in order to develop the content. It’s exactly the same thing like the software product. And then we go through that and use this method and release it in order to learn and make it better. There’s a lot of things that we learned from the seekers or the people who use it and then bring it back and make the product or the content better.

Uttam:
So what we have really seen is that the whole system from the start of the production, content production, and all the way to releasing and publishing it, posting it, we use the same method and then we get their feedback and our results have been amazing and it has reached so many people, and again, make the system much better. So just a little bit more, as I said, this is also a little bit religious or a bit of a mission. We always say that Jesus is the first agile master, was very much a centered to the seekers or people who are looking for something. So we develop our content based on what people are looking for and we try to make the best product based on their needs rather than our own ideas.

Dave Prior:
So I want to say this out loud and please be brutally honest. I want to see if this is an okay thing to say or if this comes across the wrong way. You have a product that you’re selling, you have a customer, and you’re using this approach to understand more about what your customer wants and needs. So, while you have this core mission that you’re trying to achieve in spreading the word of God or whatever. An religion, any kind of ministry would be able to take these practices and find a way to understand more about what their customer wants and a way to be more responsive to their needs in the same way that we would do that with a product.

Uttam:
Yes, exactly.

Dave Prior:
Okay. I was just nervous about saying that out loud because I didn’t want it to seem like I was being too jaded about it, but marketing is part of the job. I mean, you’ve got to get people to come and listen.

Uttam:
Yeah. Right, right. It’s exactly the same. And I think that every time we are selling, we are selling ourselves as well, and our ideas, our thoughts and everything. And when we do that, the audience, the customers, the seekers are the main ones who really consume or who really use what you provide to them. So you only can make those products better if we really listen to them who uses it and develop our product. So it should be the seeker or customer focused and then we can always make it better. It may be in the technology sector, or religious sector, or community sector, even development in all of that. I always say go to the people first, learn from them, get those ideas in order to develop your own products.

Dave Prior:
That’s awesome. So what advice would you give somebody who runs, whether it’s a ministry or a nonprofit or some sort of service organization that is considering trying to adopt agile practices or taking training? What advice would you give them?

Uttam:
Yes, I would say, as I told you earlier, Jesus was the first agile master. So the best way to do the mission, to be productive in a mission, is to use the agile method, which he really says you have to learn everything from the people that you have been to share the gospel to. And they are the major, they are the center of learning so that you can bring the message more productively. And so I think that there should be a big mind shift right now because for those organizations, they’ve always thought that they have the best thing and then they go. They don’t know the culture, they don’t know the language, they don’t know the context. They don’t know what they are looking for. They don’t know their own journey, so they’re missing the point.

Uttam:
So I think that agile would be the best strategy if they want to be very successful in their mission and ministries. I think that everybody, now the churches or other religious organizations should go and take this training in order to revolutionize their own program.

Dave Prior:
That’s great. Thank you. If somebody wants to learn more about the work that you do, what is the best way for them to find you?

Uttam:
Yes. People could find us on the website, hopeweb.org. That’s the one, that is our mission. Also, we have our Facebook, Hope of Life, as well. That’s our Facebook page. But if they want to learn about children and hopehomenepal.org, that’s the orphanage, so they can visit that one as well. And then overall mission, if they visit gcministries.net, they also find us over there as well.

Dave Prior:
All right, I’m going to have to get all these links from you to include, because I only had the GC ministries one. And what if they want to reach out to you? I can see that your contact information is available on the ministry’s website, so I’ll include your email address in here as well so folks can reach out. But thank you for the work that you do and thank you for taking time out to do this. And thanks for coming to the class. It was really great to have you in class and to get that perspective on all this stuff.

Uttam:
Well, we thank you so much for the opportunity to come and share. And what I want to tell you is that you gave me the class, but you are impacting the world, especially among the Nepalis, and those orphans and widows and poor people and people who need to hear the gospel, so all of them, through your help and support, and we have really benefited a lot and you’ve made a difference. Thank you so much.

Dave Prior:
Thank you.

In this video, we explore our iterative and incremental Agile Transformation framework and discuss why this approach is valuable to large organizations attempting to adopt sustainable Agile practices.

Additionally, we’ll discuss the common failure modes we often see in our clients’ business architecture.

Then, we’ll identify opportunities where you can implement DevOps practices alongside Agile methodology to improve your Agile metrics, accelerate business alignment, and achieve your desired business goals.

Lastly, we’ll cover how our all-new Studios offering is helping our clients implement all this and more.

Website: https://go.leadingagile.com/jvc

Agile Transformation white paper: https://go.leadingagile.com/0i0

Also, check out our newly redesigned resource center. We collected all our articles, white papers, webinars, and more into one easily searchable location: https://go.leadingagile.com/bks

Contents of this Video:

0:00 Our Agile Transformation Framework

2:21 Business Alignment Failure Modes

5:12 DevOps & Agile

8:27 All-New Studios Offering

Transcript

All right. Today I want to talk about product extraction and how we can use that to reach higher base camps.
First, when we’re tallking about product extraction, let’s talk about what hasn’t changed from what Leading Agile traditionally does. So if you know Leading Agile, we have an approach and an opinion on how you take slices of an organization through a transformation. And we have not changed that. We still have base camps and treks and expeditions and outcomes based plans. So what we’re talking about here when we’re talking about product extraction and technical dependencies is more of a yes and. Yes, we need to do what we’ve traditionally done, and we need to do these things in order to be sure we’re successful at reaching the higher base camps. This is just another view of the same thing. We’re going to very much be focused in on the slice of the pie here around technology and architecture, but all of the other types of dependencies and external orchestration need to be dealt with. And we still care about all of those things, we’re just focused in on the technology and architecture slides too.

So when we’re looking at moving from base camp one to two to three, what we tend to find is as you’re moving between base camp two and three, there’s a set of technical dependencies and impediments that really make that trip harder. When you’re looking at a base camp three or four team, our goal is to break the dependencies and increase local autonomy, where different teams or different products can work at different paces and be enhanced independently, built independently, deployed independently, and tested independently. And in order to do that, these technical impediments need to be dealt with.

So that’s the framing of the problem we’re going to talk about today. So let’s talk about what is product extraction and why would I need to do it? When we plan an expedition or plan a transformation, we help you identify products that align to your customers and markets. And as you do that, we look for products that we can put one to two pizza teams around so people… The idea of the pizza analogy is that you could feed the team with two pizzas for lunch. So it’s not a huge team. But we want those teams to be able to enhance, build, test and deploy their product with minimal orchestration, right? So we want that team to be able to be laser-focused on their customer, internal or external, in solving that problem and not being overly dependent on all the other teams. The challenge is, in big enterprises, the system architecture could look like this, and if you overlay the product architecture, the two don’t align. There’s… They weren’t designed with each other in mind.

So if you simplify the problem and you look at it and say, “We have… If we just had two products, we would want to have each system that supports that product have clear APIs, contract tests and mocks, so that each can be worked independently, and again, that they could be enhanced, built tested and deployed independently.” Sometimes that’s not possible and we have one big system that we need the two products to co-exist within. But then we need to be able to have two teams working within that code base and they need to have componentized build and test protection so that they can each make changes without being overly dependent on the other.

As you get to more complex environments with mainframes or packages, you’re going to have a combination of the two models, where you’ll have… Like in this diagram, product one, two, three, and four… Let’s say they could be mobile apps or websites that have their own system that can be built in a way that it’s independent, and we have other product teams that might all be part of the same ERP. And they need to be able to do things in a componentized way. Ultimately, the acceptance criteria are the same, but the strategy is going to be a combination of clear, separated APIs where possible, and componentized builds where necessary. So that’s the goal, right? We want our systems, architecture, and our product architecture to align. If I use another analogy here, if you had an architecture and you wanted to take one component out of the architecture, it would be like picking up one chocolate chip or one M&M, and many times the design of the architecture isn’t the problem, it’s what happens to the implementation over time.
So as heat gets applied, right? The architecture loses some of its encapsulation. So heat in this analogy could be deadlines, could be changing requirements, could be new market forces… But what we often find when get to a client is something that looks like this, where there was a good architecture design, but as things changed, it’s a bit of a mess to try to figure out “How do I separate things? How do I divide and conquer?” Right? It’s not a soft gooey center when it’s heated up, but still well encapsulated with good protection around it. So there’s two approaches to deal with this. If you’re… In most cases, what we can do is we can extract a product from this architecture and get it into an encapsulated product.

So we did decouple the code, we refactor to have clear APIs, we create contract tasks or mocks. And in the process of doing that, there’s other practices like continuous integration and test data management that will also be improved. Sometimes if things are so bad that really there’s not much of the initial architecture left, we may be doing component rewrite where the market’s changed so much or the APIs are so unclear that we need to basically write some decoupled code and do it more or less from scratch. So that wouldn’t happen for an entire application usually, that might be certain components within it. So you may do a mix of product extraction and component rewrite or reimplementation in order to get to the model that you want, where your product architecture and your systems architectures are aligned. And ultimately, that’s what’s going to help you reach that base camp three and four goal, by continuing to do the things that you do at your expedition and transformation level around the people and the process and so forth. But starting to look at some of those technology dependencies that provide a lot of drag in the process.

In the end, if you can align your systems architecture with your product architecture, you’ll be able to move faster and respond to the market more quickly. And that’s essential for base camp three and above teams. We believe that product extraction is something that every organization needs to do. We have a few ways that our studios and our technical coaching can come alongside and help you get there. The reason you need help in getting there in many cases is because teams that are just forming and just getting used to some of these agile practices are not experts in refactoring and product extraction. And long-term, they don’t need to be. Because once you have the product extraction done and things are working in an independent way, you don’t need to bring in a separate… You don’t need that additional skillset. So oftentimes we find, either for speed or for capacity reasons, clients are looking for someone to help them with their product extraction.

We do this from two different stances, from a studio stance where you can put a team in that can do the product extraction or the refactoring or the reimplementation of the components to get your software into that modular state. We also, from a coaching standpoint, have a scaled technical uplift model where we can help your teams improve their skills. Often the best way to do this is a one-two punch, where during your expeditions, you have a scaled technical coaching model implemented so your team’s technical skill is increasing. And then for those higher order skills that are a one-time need, or there’s not enough capacity to handle, you’ll bring in a studio’s team that can do the extraction, turn it over to your uplifted team throughout the journey of the expedition, and then eventually move on to solve other problems. Studios and technical coaching are two ways that we can help accelerate and improve your ability to get beyond base camp to base camps three, four, and five.

In this video, we explore our iterative and incremental Agile Transformation framework and discuss why this approach is valuable to large organizations attempting to adopt sustainable Agile practices.

Additionally, we’ll discuss the common failure modes we often see in our clients’ business architecture.

Then, we’ll identify opportunities where you can implement DevOps practices alongside Agile methodology to improve your Agile metrics, accelerate business alignment, and achieve your desired business goals. Lastly, we’ll cover how our all-new Studios offering is helping our clients implement all this and more.

Website: https://go.leadingagile.com/jvc

Agile Transformation white paper: https://go.leadingagile.com/0i0

Also, check out our newly redesigned resource center. We collected all our articles, white papers, webinars, and more into one easily searchable location: https://go.leadingagile.com/bks

Each view of an organization’s enterprise architecture (business, information, solution, and technology) presents distinct challenges for value creation. Solution architecture defines the structure of the software elements of a business capability by determining the responsibilities of each component in the software. Solution architecture can either be an important contributor to value or an insurmountable barrier to change. The key challenge in defining the structure of the software is the assignment of responsibilities to solution components in a way that simultaneously:

• Maximizes business flexibility,
• Meets technical requirements, and
• Delivers the lowest total cost of ownership.

To meet this challenge, architects must understand and leverage four sources of economic value derived from an effectively designed solution architecture: customer, profitability, reliability, and performance.

What do we mean by “economic value?”

Public companies are held accountable through the quarterly publishing of their earnings reports. At the end of the day, value shows up on a company’s income statement as revenue minus cost ultimately reflected in its operating income.  Other financial metrics such as return on invested capital (ROIC) illustrate the earnings performance of a company relative to its debt and equity financing. Investors use these metrics to make investment decisions that impact companies’ stock prices.  Although privately held companies and non-profit organizations have less visible forms of accountability, all organizations can benefit from wise solution architecture decisions that improve their business capabilities.

“Show me the money!”

– Rod Tidwell, in Jerry Maguire

The key point here is that value can be measured. It is the responsibility of solution architects to guide product development teams to quantify the value generated by software-based products so this value can be used to make decisions about the architecture. For example, a business capability that generates $50 million a year in gross margin should not be burdened with a solution architecture that costs $50 million a year to operate.

On the other hand, value is more than just cost. Over the past decade, many companies have realized that superior software enables them to earn higher margins on hardware-based products. Customers are willing to pay more for a superior product, and incremental margins generated by superior products can be used to justify investments in solution architecture.

Beginning with the End in Mind: Customer Value

The primary responsibility of physical architecture components is to support high-quality customer experiences, products that customers love to use. Effective solution architecture assigns the right responsibilities in the right components, enabling experience designers and application developers to deliver products that are a joy to use. Engaging experiences deliver quantifiable economic value that is measured by growing product use, increased conversion rates, and ultimately, higher customer lifetime value.

Solution architecture decisions that facilitate ease of use include things like caching information close to the point of use, incorporation of knowledge about the customer to reduce friction in a business process, security to increase trust in the product, and horizontal scaling to maximize availability.

The Bottom Line: Profitability

The profit perspective on solution architecture is all about enabling the greatest velocity of change at the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO). Customer and market demands change rapidly, sometimes through unanticipated events like the COVID-19 pandemic. Flexible architectures enable more rapid change at a lower TCO. The ability to change rapidly at a low cost increases an organization’s ability to learn from its customers, which improves the profitability of products and business capabilities.

The most critical solution architecture decisions that influence profitability focus on component simplicity and automation of change processes. The YAGNI principle (“you aren’t gonna need it”) applies here. Fewer, simpler components in an architecture mean that less overall change is required to add or modify a feature that delivers business value. Since architects are expected to be forward-thinking in their intentional plans for solutions, they tend to exhibit an inherent bias toward over-architecting things. Minimizing the architectural overhead of a business capability by making it as simple as possible is one technique architects can use to overcome this bias.

You Can’t Serve Customers if You’re Offline: Reliability

It’s about 1:30 PM on Cyber Monday, the biggest e-commerce shopping day of the year. The traffic monitors on the HTTP tier of the e-commerce site are spiking, signaling a large ramp-up in traffic over the last 30 minutes. The increase in traffic appears to be primarily impacting the front-end web servers. Joe, the Operations Director, looks at the email on his cell phone and notices a marketing email for the site arrived in his inbox about 30 minutes ago. A call to Marketing confirms his suspicion. Marketing dropped a 5-million-piece campaign at the top of the hour, and as people click through to the website from their email, traffic is spiking. Will the site handle the workload?

Fortunately, this story has a happy ending. Joe’s team conducted extensive stress testing of the e-commerce site prior to the start of the holiday season, so once he saw the arrival rate peak at about 1:45 PM, he knew that the site could handle the incoming traffic. Over the next two hours, shoppers began to become buyers, and by 6:00 PM, the e-commerce team in both India and the U.S. began celebrating what would become the largest one-day sales volume in the history of the website.

The reliability of a product or service is critical for customers to be willing to rely on it. Effective solution architecture increases reliability in a couple of significant ways. First, it helps teams deliver the required business functionality with fewer moving parts. Fewer parts result in fewer things that can break. Second, effective architectures maximize component independence and are horizontally scalable. Solutions designed for component independence can absorb the failure of a non-trivial percentage of components without degrading all customers’ experiences. Reduced failure rates lead to lower production support and maintenance costs, enabling teams to spend a higher proportion of their effort building or enhancing business capabilities.

Is Your Service Feeling Abandoned? Performance Matters

The last area of economic value delivered through solution architecture is performance. A 2018 website performance study by Pingdom found that if a website takes 5 seconds to load a page, 38% of the visitors abandon the site. Effectively designed architectures not only reduce chattiness across application services but also eliminate non-value-adding work. Improved performance not only makes it easier to satisfy customers, but it can also lower the cost per unit of work from 20 – 90%, enhancing the profitability of the organization’s business capabilities.

Conclusions

Customer value, profitability, reliability, and performance are the four ways that solution architecture contributes economic value to an organization. Solution architecture is primarily a structural concern in that the distribution of responsibilities across components is a way to describe the structure of the software supporting a business capability. We optimize the structure of the software by understanding how its components contribute economic value. Companies that account for these sources of economic value as they undertake their journeys to agility are more likely to achieve permanent, sustainable improvements in their ability to meet customer and market needs than those that focus solely on practices or culture.

“It is wonderful what great strides can be made when there is a resolute purpose behind them.”
– Winston Churchill

An intention is something that you want or plan to do. A goal can be a statement of what one intends to accomplish. But a purpose, that’s much more meaningful. It’s the reason why something is done, it’s the defined end state of an intention or a goal. It’s a determination to accomplish something passionate, engaging, and consequential. It provides a sense of mission that is compelling.

When striving toward purpose our choices and actions matter. There will be difficulties and challenges you will encounter that require patience and persistence, but overall you should have a sense of joy and excitement in the work you do and in your relationships.

If you wake up every day filled with apathy or dread, you’re probably not doing what you were meant to do. If you can no longer be positive at work or around those you care about, it’s a sign you may have lost your purpose.

Ultimately having purpose is a choice. We can choose to do things that will bring us more joy and give us more of a sense of purpose. We also choose what and who influences us.

Influencers can be trusted advisers, co-workers, personal relationships, the content we read, or anything we expose ourselves to mentally, physically or spiritually. Be intentional regarding your connections with people. We need people around us who will lift us up but also who will challenge us, call us out and push us when we feel like giving in or giving up.

Each of us have specific gifts, strengths, and super powers. Maybe you’re a problem solver. Or you have a business acumen. Perhaps you’re great at organizing people and getting things done. Your alignment to a fulfilling purpose likely involves the things for which you already have knowledge, competencies and skills.

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
– Albert Einstein

A passion for continuous learning can be particularly valuable in helping you discover and drive toward your purpose. It allows you an opportunity for insight and understanding, to explore your creative capacities.

“Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.”
– John Holt, American author and educator

Every experience whether good or bad ends up teaching you something, but whether you gain knowledge from it is your choice. This is an attained prowess and doesn’t come naturally to most people. It will take practice, a conscious effort and deliberate actions on your part to master learning as a routine behavior. Own your learning to find your purpose, make it self-directed and self-initiated.

“What makes people smart, curious, alert, observant, competent, confident, resourceful, persistent – in the broadest and best sense, intelligence – is not having access to more and more learning places, resources and specialists, but being able in their lives to do a wide variety of interesting things that matter, things that challenge their ingenuity, skill, and judgement, and that make an obvious difference in their lives and the lives of the people around them.”
– John Holt

Question what you are doing and why. What is the one thing you’re particularly passionate about? You’ve heard it asked before; if money wasn’t an issue, what would you love to do? Where do your gifts intersect with your passions?

We need to own our sense of purpose and setting our path toward discovering our desired mission in life. And although individuals are ultimately responsible for their own outcomes, the results of their efforts. As a leader there are environments you can help create to enable others to be more successful in their endeavors. 

One of the most impactful things leaders can do is make certain the organization’s purpose, mission, vision answers one question for people:

Why did they even bother to get out of bed this morning…? People don’t want to join a corporation, they want to join a purpose.