By Janus Boye
Quite a few years ago I saw a famous slide that simply said:
Old organisation + new technology = expensive old organisation
Since we can’t do much about the left side of the equation, we decided to host our first ever agile business conference track last week at the Boye Aarhus 16 conference. The objective was to try to address the right side of the equation. How do we turn complex organisations into more flexible and faster organisations?
While moderating the 4 conference sessions on the track, I learned so much and I wanted to highlight and share some of my findings.
There’s a black market for common sense
Morten Elvang opened the day with a session titled Game Changing Beliefs. In the session and discussion that followed he answered what agile really requires, both in terms of behaviour and structure.
During his well prepared presentation, he also shared what became one of my favourite conference slides titled Prison 3.0 as shown below
He used the humorous slide to illustrate how organisations of today are a big part of the problem. He also introduced the term “black market for common sense” to describe how employees tend to find alternative ways to get things done, e.g. by using non-sanctioned IT tools or skipping parts of the governance model.
Our morning keynote speaker Michael Bednar-Brandt from Oracle contributed actively to this session raising the discussions on game changing beliefs to a new level. Here’s some of the beliefs that Morten went through:
Accept that most ideas are bad
Enable everyone to learn and act intelligently
The worst cost is what you can’t do, because of what you did
Small, fast, simple beat large, slow, complex any day
Lean project metrics
One of my favorite questions to ask is:
What’s the problem you are trying to solve?
Karoliina Luoto from Finnish-based consultancy Codento shared a tangible dashboard to provide a transparent view of how to track progress. By going through the different components of the dashboard, she shared both examples of useful project metrics as well as examples of how having an established dashboard with key metrics can help change the mindset for those involved in the project.
Another simple, yet important point in Karoliina’s talk that several participants also highlighted afterwards were:
Change metrics when they become too easy
You can already find Karoliina’s slides on Slideshare: Lean Project Leadership – Minimum Metrics
How to really be agile
To most readers, the term agile is probably not new. It has been around for a while, and has also made it beyond the realm of digital leaders. There are popular books on the topic and we’ve also previously had very popular sessions at both Boye conferences and group meetings on the topic, including by award-winning UK-based agency MMT Digital.
While it is always interesting, and often entertaining, to hear agencies talk the talk, I found the presentation by Lisbeth Storgaard at eBay extremely interesting as it offered a case study from the customer perspective. Her session was titled Build great products faster with small diverse teams.
Lisbeth introduced the term dual track agile, which was new to me. I understood this as a way to address the problem of how the discovery and development project phases requires different ways of working. You can do both in 2 week sprints, but dual track agile presents an approach to connect the dots so that the learnings from the discovery team gets into the development team, in particular without loosing speed.
A different world requires different organisations
Finally Matthias Henrici from German-based Safari Consulting shared insights specifically to large, complex and old organisations. His focus was on examples that can help us deliver faster and ways to fit agile into non-agile organisations.
During his session I shared this tweet on the term MLP (Minimum Lovable Product) which was new to me.
Learned a new term:
Minimum Lovable Product (MLP) as opposed to Minimum Viable Productvia a great talk on agile by @mhenrici #jboye16
— Janus Boye (@janusboye) November 3, 2016
From reading my notes now a week later, Matthias described MLP as the version of your product that delivers the most love with the least effort.