Digi-sign Reorganization Agreement Made Easy

Digi sign reorganization agreement

thank you everyone for joining us today and for our bjss webinar is the agile manifesto still fit for purpose um we are recording today's session and we do want it to be as interactive as possible we don't have the chat functionality available but please do send in any hellos comments or of course questions using the q a functionality we have got mario um who's on hand to be a translator for any agile jargon or acronyms that people may not be aware of so hopefully it will work we'll try it out he will be sending it through the q a and i will make that live to the audience so without further ado i'd like to hand over to david to introduce today's session lovely thank you karen um right yes so today's session we're going to be talking about the agile manifesto and not trying to answer the question is the agile manifesto still fit for purpose uh just in terms of a running order um we'll do a quick introductions before we get started uh so you get the opportunity to meet the team uh then we're gonna sort of um run through uh get a little bit of context so you know why are we talking about the agile manifesto and then to try and answer a few questions around people's experiences with it so what what were people trying to achieve when they uh looked at the agile manifesto and tried to adopt these new ways of working what challenges have they faced uh when they've been on this journey um and then so you come back to the question really around whether um whether there is a need for a sort of an agile manifesto 2.0 and if there is you know what what sort of things would it cover and then we'll also look at the question of external support and how um how useful that is in um for clients on there on their journey towards um adopting these these new ways of working um so um just to start off with a few introductions so we'll start with me since i'm talking anyway my name's david smith uh i'm an agile coach i work with bgss i've been working with bgss for a little over a year but i've been doing agile agile coaching for a number of years and really i see my role as being helping to help organizations deliver value to their customers if i'm going to hand over to emma hi everyone my name is emma roster i'm a delivery manager based out of the london office i'm also the lead for the delivery management team in london i've been with vjss for about seven years now lee if you'd like to go next well thank you so i'm lee white i'm a head of delivery at bgss based out of our nottingham office i've been with bgss for about four and a half years now so in addition to my head of delivery role i also have an agile delivery consultant thank you anseb sebastian bonicel i am a delivery manager in the midlands i also lead the delivery manager uh or management capability for the midlands um i've been at vgs for a couple of years and i've had various career moves as a scrum master agile coach agile evangelist let's call it okay thank you very much and yeah just to sort of um confirm we work for this company bjss which is a leading technology and engineering consultancy for business um we are we sort of pride ourselves on being trusted by our clients and we collaborate with them to deliver complex and innovative technology and engineering solutions that are actually used by millions of people every day um so we've rolled those out across a number of organizations in government and in the private sector and as the map shows we have offices all around the uk and we're headquartered in leeds but um we have offices all around the uk uh as well as an international presence in the us and and most recently in lisbon um so yeah so let's um start with a little bit of context so as many of you will be aware um back in 2001 um there was a group of well what one of the delegates actually described as 17 middle-aged white guys who who got together at a ski resort in in snowbird in utah and came up with this agile manifesto and this was really in response to um the fact that um there was a sort of increasing realization that people and organizations were struggling to get their software delivered so a lot of money a lot of time and a lot of effort was being invested in software delivery and frequently by one or other measure those deliveries were unsuccessful so so this group of individuals came together to form this framework um which was a values based which they believed would help uh organizations on this on this uh on this road to delivery so um so having come up with this um a lot of organizations have tried to adopt this new way of working um and you know they've been tempted by this promise of better quality software delivered delivery to their customers more quickly this highly motivated but very happy workforce um all sort of um combining to make this quite a tempting prospect um for them in in their sort of uh in their business context and um and so there's been a lot of a lot of organizations who've tried on this journey um and there's been a lot of support for them so there's lots of sort of ways in which you can learn about this there are meetups there are conferences books one book in particular um stands out has been a good example you can get uh certifications um and also there are lots of uh lots of articles lots of blog pieces lots of information available um and i think you know sort of finally um you know finally agile finally arrived in the harvard business review back in about may 2016 so um so you know we knew then that it had really sort of taken a hold i probably knew before then but we we knew then that this sort of hpr had recognized it as a thing um and um and so it was a and this is this thing is a sort of this new way of working but i think there is a sort of recognition and you can see this in in you know each of these forums that it is not straightforward so changing your ways of working is not an easy thing to do so so we're here today to discuss that and discuss whether the manifesto helps with that um with that adoption of these new ways of working uh and whether it's still fit to address the challenges that organizations face today so with that context set um i guess we should start at the beginning um so the first question is i think what what are what do we think that clients or organizations are trying to achieve when they are embarking on this sort of this agile journey and in terms of changing their ways of working what what do they want to get out of it um there's a few examples on the right hand side and i don't know if any of the panel would sort of say that these are things that resonate with them or whether there's other other elements as well yes so i'll i'll go first so certainly uh from my experience over the past kind of ten or so years uh working with clients i would say that the majority of the kind of end states that uh clients are wanting to achieve for me and in my experience as i say is around speed of delivery to market especially in these highly competitive times with lots of startups clamoring for people's businesses especially in the larger enterprises they're looking to become more nimble and get away from their kind of lethargic governance states that they currently have and looking to get new innovative products to market as quickly as possible to maintain and grow their market share and that's certainly one of the major elements i see and the other ones are around people who have kind of dabbled and dip their toe into the kind of agile space and found that um they've got themselves into a bit of a pickle around their delivery processes and or their quality of their deliverables that they're putting out because they've maybe not put the rigor around that some of the agile practices need in place in order to make sure you are maintaining the quality both from a technical and a process perspective so that's my two cents worth sure any other thing i think yeah i think some of the things i've seen um for businesses are that they really want greater transparency around what's being delivered so i think previously when we were delivering in waterfall types of way and you didn't really know what you were getting until pretty much the very end of it so i think it's useful for the business to see progress as they're going and having that constant feedback loop into them showing progress things like that are definitely things that they're looking for and i think also being able to respond and change is a big thing for businesses as well as lee was saying markets are changing quite rapidly and companies need to be very responsive and working in an agile way really helps companies to align better with that i think and certainly much more so than than the old waterfall delivery ways that visibility point is quite interesting because it's there's two elements to that i think aren't there one of the one of the um one of the elements is as you say you can put the product in front of the customer on a sort of more regular basis so they they have site of the changes that you make and any um there's an opportunity there for them to provide feedback i think there's also a visibility from the point of view of i mean we're all quite used to or we all were quite used to the sort of the monthly rank status report on project updates and uh and that you know quite often was painted a fairly favorable picture for a large portion of the project until it sort of approached delivery at which point it would start to go amber and red and i think in an agile context i think the metrics that we use tend to be a bit more real world um and as a result it's a sort of a better representation of the reality of what's going on with the project um and that can be quite helpful for decision making and making choices about what you want to do next and what you want to stop doing and start doing i think we we need to also recognize that there's a there's been an evolution in the last 19 years of the goals of on you know for clients or indeed for individual organization using the agile manifesto or the agile with a big a um an evolution from the original intention of the manifesto as you know specifically around software to a gradual increase of how do we do agility at an organizational level so now if you look at goals of why people use this approach is really targeted at a multi-layer view of the world the business aligning to i.t it's not just a microcosm of a single scrum team it's multiple scrum teams and how they fit in a bigger portfolio sense to try to understand the bigger picture and so that goal has changed and has evolved do we actually are we getting better by using this manifesto and the principles in it that is a big question is that manifesto enough to be able to cater for that goal change evolution that's probably part of what we're trying to answer today yeah i think we might we might want to come back to that in a little bit whether it'll indeed enough but i think i think you're i mean i think you're right i think there's this notion of agile can be applied beyond software and i think it has been applied beyond software um in in a number of instances now and i think um when we were talking earlier lee you mentioned that for example we have our design studio in in spark and whilst they use a lot of the agile techniques in terms of close collaboration with the customer short feedback loops driving changes um and um and really sort of um you know using that as a way of sort of getting something in front of a customer quickly and being able to launch you know to put something live quickly they're actually looking at um stuff such as uh you know service design strategy um and not potentially not writing any code at all correct and that's right it's uh it's it's an increasing trend that's been coming been happening for about the last five or six years i would say and certainly if you if you catch up on any of the latest kind of thinkings around um for example scrum um scrum is used in all kinds of industries now not just software um so schools you know broadcasting all kinds of industries are adopting it as a way to tackle problems and to deliver value or in whatever form that may come that may be news stories it may be educational uh outcomes you know those types of things so it's been seen as a really good way to both visualize work state and to make sure you are making those incremental steps towards the goal you're trying to achieve right and um you know we'll probably get onto this a little bit later on the manifesto itself is focused on software so no spoilers there but you know we'll uh we'll get around to that yeah indeed yeah i mean i think that's it's well known it was born out of software um but as we say we've seen we've seen more wider more wider adoptions of it since i think it probably is worth calling out as well so that that middle point that we've got on there around aligning business in it that's a that is a particular kind of issue we see in lots of lots of the larger enterprises that we work with where you do have the idea of the business and then the it you know the delivery people and you know anyone who's read the phoenix project will kind of you know have come one of those aha moments where they'll recognize the characters and the behaviors from that particular book and you know it's uh it's designed as a kind of caricature of it but so many of those behaviors are real and what we see in clients and that kind of collaborative aspect and bringing everyone together to that common goal is something that's really critical um and it probably is something that you know when we get to talking about the manifesto we'll be able to pick up a little bit more yeah yeah that collaborative element that that that mindset shift if you like towards that collaboration is is really is really sort of key okay i'm all right so so we've got a sort of an understanding so we're talking about these themes of um improved responsiveness being able to adapt to change getting better collaboration in your organization getting better visibility of um of the work that's going on either either in terms of the thing the product uh and also in terms of how it's um uh reported and seen by the the rest of the organization um so that sounds great right this is all this is all super stuff so so what stops people doing it you know what are the obstacles what challenges have have clients faced in terms of being able to achieve those goals if i may just kind of go in directly there i mean just personal experience as a as a delivery manager would go into an engagement which usually is usually very specific about a particular project we go into the client context we organize a single team or a couple of teams and we're told okay you you've been brought in to help us with the ways of working just tell us what good agile looks like just do it and you know more often or not we are successful at this um and then at some point you get to a place where you need to talk about budgeting and they need to talk about getting more people out from the bau teams or you're about to do a release and and then you start to hit some of the big blockers of an organization that is just focusing on one part and trying to do that well that is one of the key obstacles that we've seen the the scaling of not the size of what is happening but the scaling of the concept applied to a particular team and how that team fits the bigger picture yeah yeah i think we very much see that um separation between teams and i think a lot in terms of governance process within companies as well so you have teams doing agile or you know doing scrum doing kanban all these different things and it works well until you get to that stage where as we say here that you have those funding cycles and those governance gates and you have to have ticked off a number of documentation boxes and a number of different things before you can actually progress through that which in an agile world you're not actually producing that kind of collateral so you're kind of stuck trying to wedge what you're doing into a very waterfall type of process which just doesn't work and trying to get companies to get to the stage where their financial models actually support um what we're doing in an agile way is really really difficult because budget cycles are set you know quite once a year we kind of get together we put together our project budgets and we review them as we go through but it's not a case of you know maybe how we would do it with an agile way of doing things is that every few months you'd you'd review what have you gotten out of your project so far and actually make those hard decisions about should you continue the project or should you kill it and nobody likes to kill projects so um but that is one of the benefits of agile is that you can see how well or badly the project is going quite early on and make those kind of critical decisions but not if you're trapped into those kind of very waterfall types of funding cycles yeah i think i think one of the other things that we see quite commonly is um an underestimation of the the size and scale of what needs to happen to become an agile organization um overlaying scrum on top of your development department for example as we kind of mentioned that does not necessarily mean that you've gained all the benefits of becoming an agile organization it's it's a fundamental mind shift uh that needs to take place to truly get the benefits uh in all aspects of your business you know that kind of lean startup thinking so there's a kind of a letting go of that uh command and control mentality in that cascade of needs and requirements from the top down to teams leaving just the doers to implement the will of the directors or whomever it may be enabling those teams to have that kind of idea of self-organization and empowerment to make decisions at the kind of the grassroots where the work actually happens is critical and it's a really difficult thing when you've got that entrenched way of working within your organization and those cultural elements as well that go along with that to kind of almost let that go and put the trust in the people who are doing the work to kind of imagine that work and to create it and then to deliver it in collaboration with everyone and that's a pretty fundamental thing you're actually turning the whole organization upside down and reversing the way the work happens um but a lot of organizations plug in scrum and expect that to work and then we start hitting those obstacles that seb mentioned of you know when you try to release a thing or when you try to get approval to spend some more money because you've delivered you've understood a really great way to add more value to the organization so it's uh it's a really difficult thing and the underestimation of quite what you're taking on when you try to transform your organization to this way of working is one of the things we commonly see yeah i think around that self-organization piece and empowerment of people within the company that's a huge cultural shift and i think definitely one of the obstacles i've seen in a number of companies is that when you get down to the grassroots level if people haven't had that culture before where they have been empowered to make decisions and they've been allowed to fail they've been allowed to make mistakes and you know make changes as a result of that and i think that's a really key thing a lot of the time uh companies punish people for failure but actually failure up early and and you know early days in the project is actually a good thing right because we're learning from our mistakes and we make improvements and we change things absolutely um coming to that later on you know whereas before we would have found the failures all towards the end which is when everything starts to go red not such a good thing um but i think one of the cultural issues that we face then with the teams is there's a reluctance to self-organize sometimes that they don't feel empowered they feel they'll be blamed they don't feel protected it's easier to point to someone else and say actually i'm going to give my responsibility to you you are in charge and i prefer it that way because now i don't have to take that responsibility and accept any consequences that might come out of that so i think there is a bit around that in how do we make that cultural change to make people feel comfortable with self-organization and the empowerment and the level of responsibility that happens i think yeah i think it a lot of it is coming down to that leadership and what leadership means in the kind of modern way of delivering things it's it needs to be a different kind of leadership it's an inspirational empowering leadership um rather than a telling leadership and you know that's you know having the people who are leading organizations aware of how they should behave and how how they should be with people is critical to that and there is a maybe something that may be unpopular with people listening in that um you know there is such a thing as common sense in the world of of agile there are such thing as chrome as dsdm as dad as less as safe um and these are all good and and and well intentioned but the reality is that one of the key obstacles of leadership buy-in is moving into a place where you are trying to do an agile transformation even if it's just you're trying to deliver a product using scrum these frameworks are not the answer to the question they are not the answers to all the goals that you have in terms of delivering value quick delivering the right thing they are only tools to get to that place and one of the obstacles that we see is people wanting we want to use safe just land it please well the reality is what we are here to do is to to talk about the mindset to talk about how your people need to self-organize and that is a really different kind of proposition a different approach to thinking about how to resolve the challenges that our clients face so we're mindful of complex structures in corporate context that are trying to do grand things we're also mindful of the great advantages of delivering and using the the principles are outlined in the manifesto how they scale up and down but we also need to be mindful that common sense prevails and that's the really one of the best tools that we have to remove some of the obstacles that we have in front of us yeah that that reliance on process was brought home to me actually just this week in a conversation with a client when uh the comment was that um people in the organization are not failed or not um uh it's not failure to let your customer down it is a failure to not follow the process and there's a sort of uh there was a it was quite a telling comment in a in the conversation in terms of how the you know how the organization operates and then the culture uh within it but that sort of reliance on frameworks is something that i think a lot of organizations do and they expect agile to provide another framework another process for them to to to adhere to um rather than as as we've been saying to really embrace the mindset change that that that is required to make this successful so um so yeah so that's the sort of question of that question of um the mindset that the change in leadership the the the move away from that reliance on process and frameworks and sort of very structured approaches i think um i think those are all obstacles which are probably underestimated um when when when um and client and and as you were saying as well lee that sort of the sheer scale of the work and the scale of the change that that they're taking on on this journey so um so i'm going to move this along a little bit again and then say so so based on all of that the agile manifesto do we think we need um uh do we think it needs a rewrite do we think it needs an update a 2.0 yeah stand silenced yes to all the questions i think my view of this is that i actually believe that the manifesto 1.0 still is valid it was designed for a specific purpose and at that level of granularity of a single team using a particular outcome it has huge value the principles still stand i think we start seeing it creaking at the seams when we scale when things and constraints are applied to the the value that is trying to be delivered and and therefore there is a wider picture that has emerged an evolution from the original intention which was absolutely key and still valid 20 you know 20 year old years later but the reality is agile with the big a has gone so much bigger so whilst we can still apply the principles their application in the real world may have changed may have evolved and therefore needs to be adapted i tend to disagree um so i i i think that um the manifesto as it stands now i think there are certain elements so technology's moved along you know we've been using these ways of what 20 years now and you know the way we use them has changed but i think the underlying principles and values stand the test of time and i think um if you see them as that they will help you deliver software better i think that the big question for me comes around whether you you come up with a new manifesto for non-software delivery so so that's the that's kind of a question for me but with regards to the actual manifesto as it stands today my my concern would be if you adapted it to fit the new test automation or new new approaches for a platform or whatever it may be you would make it much more brittle and it would become more of a thing than it is which for me is kind of a kind of beacon of you know hope for people to kind of strive towards without kind of making it too grandiose you know it's things that you should be adhering to and everyone will have their own interpretation of the way things should be done and i think that's a good thing um rather than a prescriptive set of things that you should have and i'm not suggesting for a second that's what seb saying there but my that's a long way of saying i think it's fine how it is thanks i think um i think i think i agree that the agile manifesto as it stands at the moment for software delivery has stood the test of time remarkably well given the amount of changes that have been going on over the past 20 years since it's been written and the speed of change in technology is huge so actually having something that's based on values rather than as we were saying anything particularly prescriptive is definitely a better way to do things and but i do also agree that given the the ways in which agile is now being applied in organizations on an enterprise level and in different areas to software delivery you you it's a bit of a struggle sometimes to apply some some of those values necessarily in those different contexts and make them work and sometimes it feels like you're you know trying to squeeze something into a shape you know so round peg square hole type thing just to just to say it's agile and so i think i would agree that there's something there about do we need a 2.0 which is not rewriting what we've had in the past for software delivery and actually that continues as is but given the way things are going now and where we're heading with taking agile organization-wide enterprise-wide and you know outside software delivery do we need a different version of the manifesto that is more applicable to those things and i think a lot of it might still stand but yeah there's there's other things it needs to consider some of which are on that list there as well and but yeah i i think two versions maybe you know i'm going to sit firmly on the fence here i mean i think there are um um i think i think the manifesto as it stands i mean if you if you if you accept the fact that you can sub if you have to substitute substitute the word software um for something else so it's a service or a service and a product or something along those lines so it's not quite so industry specific um i think the applications can be you know it can be sort of broadened enormously as we've alluded to and you were saying lee about being in education and using design and all sorts um but um but i think i think there's i think there's elements of it and some of them are listed here i think that they are they are in there but they're not as explicit as as they could be and i think i think that's perhaps one of the challenges i have with it so you know i think i think the the manifesto assumes that a product vision and an idea from a uh from a business is clearly understood and clearly articulated to a to a team who is then set the task of delivering it and even failing that that the business is then available to clarify any questions that that team may have and in my experience that's frequently not the case and that sort of investment in effort and actually being really clear on what the team is being tasked to deliver using whatever framework is is is not is not clear enough um and we've talked a little bit about mindset um and the mindset element is in there you know you have individuals and interactions over processes and tools but um is it is it as explicit as it could be you almost need like a it feels like you need a footnote saying you know nb this includes mindset shift um to help you uh to help help people understand the implications of it i think the individuals and interactions at a scale part is one of the challenges as well yeah so you know that that is obviously much easier when you've got a team that are co-located and we can all work together and there's room for everybody's voice and and time to hear it and things like that but when you when you scale that up and out um and also globally as well most of us are working with non well i think everyone's working non-co-located these days right so um but in the past as well it's like you'll have had scrum teams based you know some in europe some in asia some in the us um and you're working across multiple time zones and it's remote and it's challenging and and i think that sort of thing needs to be accommodated somehow as well it's like i mean we definitely all do it um but you know then how do you how do you raise that interactions and um individuals over process in in that kind of area i think the danger in from my perspective on taking some of those things to the kind of the next level is that it becomes an instruction manual rather than a manifesto and then it becomes we were talking a little earlier about people implementing so using scrum for example there are some rules if you read the scrum guide it will give you some practical steps to implement to do a thing and implement a framework there is no framework for the agile manifesto it's that's not what it's designed to do so if you apply more specificity to it that's a really difficult way to say it becomes more like an instruction manual and a guide than a guide and it's it's that that's where my kind of um conflict comes around kind of adding more to it however there are elements that i do agree that you know like scaling like um making sure that the delivery meets the user needs you have to squint a little bit some of the values and principles to find those things but i think that's where you overlay other elements to the delivery itself like you know if you're working in the public sector the gds standard you know those types of things you know and some kind of human psychology elements you know there are other tools you can overlay on top of the manifesto to allow you to get the delivery to where you need to be um and i think that kind of brings us on potentially to the next slide which um there we go one of the other things that you can bring to help help sort of uh help organizations understand and interpret this is is this sort of external support um so so the idea of um uh bringing agile coaching in um as a way of sort of helping helping customers um helping organizations make those interpretations i think so it says um understanding um uh what the implications are of those values and those those frameworks um have you got any thoughts on sort of agile coaching and how how that how that can be beneficial or not i think this is one of the areas that is probably the least understood when it comes to the manifesto in its application you know let me just give you a specific example um if you have a new organization people who have had a go at running a scrum team and they are scrum master for one year and then there is a reorganization and they've got a new title it's called agile coach well the reality is the manifesto itself as we've kind of been discussing is complex it's simple in its design and it's words but in this application it's really complex the the relational side the collaborative side what is it how does that translate into not just a single team as emma alluded to but into a multiple level kind of organization um how does um the cultural element of that particular location that particular company actually fit into the interpretation and the application of those principles and this is where an agile coach comes in not only do you want somebody who is knowledgeable about frameworks because there are good things about those experience of having been in the trenches but also somebody who's able to understand learn and interpret the needs of that particular organization at that particular moment and make sense of that make it real um that's really one of the key benefits of an agile coach yeah i think going back to what lee was saying earlier on it's um the manifesto is a guideline it's not anything prescriptive and i think where organizations struggle is when they don't have that internal knowledge and experience and ability to to run something that's a guideline rather than a process that they want to process they want something that they can standardize deploy at scale have everyone doing the same thing following the same ways of working it makes it much easier from an organizational perspective to do that and i think that's why there's so many different models have popped up around agile because you know organizations want that cycle the guidelines are great but i don't really know how to apply them i don't really know what that means what's the best way to do it and what are the challenges with that and actually how do i resolve those challenges so having a prescriptive framework is much more effective well is it effective it's much more efficient for them so you know they can deploy something like that and then it should if it succeeds or fails it's based on well the framework maybe wasn't the right tool but i think that's where the coaching comes in to its own um again it depends on the coach it depends on the organization you have to find a coach that suits the type of organization that you are understands the challenges that you face and how to apply those so you know that that is part of the the journey as well for companies i think from my perspective there's a there's a couple of facets to um the agile coach role so there's there's the initial kind of start-up element to it so people organizations who are trying to move to um you know a particular agile way of working you know maybe that enterprise or department or whatever so the investment in a an experienced agile coach who can help them set up those ways of working and those delivery practices and make sure they are delivering that outcome is it is an investment that will protect uh their value stream and optimize it by hopefully preventing some of the common anti-patterns that people starting up with that way of working can experience by having been there before being able to spot the signs and steer them on the right path so i mean there is an argument that organizations would want to be able to as emma mentioned earlier fail fast and fail safely and learn their own lessons as they go and that would be ideal but in this fast-paced commercial world that we're in now some of those failures are not acceptable so it can be the case that investment in something like an agile coach can help prevent some of those failures and steer the organization in the right direction and then the other facet that i find is that organizations who are operating in a way that would be deemed as agile need some optimization of their processes and practices in order to drive that continual improvement because it can be a kind of a plateau kind of mentality where oh we're this good and uh why do we need to change now having someone there with the experience to turn a mirror on the organization and the practices therein to enable them to see how they could improve and to poke and prod a little bit and use the metrics and the data to display exactly what's going on within the organization to enable them to facilitate that change themselves is really where coaches kind of come into their own so that for me there are those two elements to coaching which i think are really valuable to organizations yeah thank you yeah i think and i think the challenging thing you're absolutely right i mean that is that is part of the role of the coach is to constantly kind of hold the mirror up to the organization and the individuals in it to examine what they're doing and constantly look for better ways and i think the other element as well i think is the leadership part which which is noted on there is is that um engagement with the leadership to make i think it's frequently um missed that the leadership need to be part of the change um and i think quite often leadership because that's the way it's always worked i mean the change will happen to their guys right to their team to their organization to their department and they don't need to be part of it and i think one of the key elements of the coaching role is to sort of to go in and actually say to the leadership as well that they need to be part of this change they need to sort of live this and embody this for their their organization to take it on as well i'm a little bit aware of time and i want to give people the opportunity to ask questions um so um i'm just gonna move it on and see if there are any questions um that um have come in karen have you have you got anything there yeah i'm just gonna stop you sharing your screen so you can see all of if the agile manifesto was being rewritten who would write it wow i can imagine a krauts a crowd sourcing version of ajah manifesto 2.0 this idea of having a almost a worldwide attempt at doing something that we all agree on will that ever happen probably not because with not two billion people working in the space or call it 20 million i.t professionals in the agile world we would have 20 million version of it um but you know why not be creative um another one you talked about scaling agile as one area that isn't well covered in the agile manifesto how would you approach taking a single scrum team deliberating multi-team delivery using the same principles and what is practically missing for the manifesto to enable that wow so for me that's uh definitely a question of uh organizational context uh culture you know it would have to be a tailored approach that matches those elements it's a really difficult question you obviously have things like the scaled agile framework out there um less nexus other kind of frameworks and it's those are tools that can help you with those types of things and it completely depends on what kind of organization you are what you're trying to achieve and how you want to get there as well so i don't think i can really give you an answer other than analyzing all of those things and finding the right tool for the job you might even create your own kind of process to match if required done instead if you have anything to add to that or emma so there's another one um how do you marry an annual finance cycle with an agile delivery cycle i wish i knew is the answer to that one um so um i've i've yet to see it done well um i think there's certain there's there's such a difference between the financial teams that i've come across and the the i.t way of delivering things in an agile framework that um they don't marry particularly well i actually think it needs a complete rethink of how finance is done to support agile processes because it doesn't fit in with the standardized financial accounting practices which i appreciate are incredibly well established and you know um people in finance don't particularly want to change those because they are pretty painful in fairness as well for anyone who's had experience with them um at the moment it seems to be a trying to find ways that you know work best for you and for the organization that you're in so just kind of understanding what they need from their financial teams and trying to work with that trying to i think a lot of the time i spend is you know working with the finance teams trying to educate them in terms of what we what we can deliver and what we can't deliver for what they need and trying to come to some sort of agreement and collaboration with them around how much will they accept from us or how little they accept from us um in relation to what they need and kind of take that as an ongoing work in progress so that's been my experience i think one of the things i find around this that you can get a degree of predictability around it and operate within that construct of an annual financial cycle is within a if you build self-organizing product-centric teams you have a predictable unit in terms of cost because you know how much it costs to run a team and they have everything they need to do the job they need to do so you know how much all of your teams will cost and if you can adapt your thinking from project to product and adjust your workflow to be smaller so that it flows better you can actually operate within an annual cycle but review it quarterly or how more often if you can to divert your funds and the work to the areas of your value streams that are offering the most value to your organization so it might be um customer acquisition or it may be customer retention or it may be infrastructure upgrades depending on the needs at that point in time but you reduce your review cycle within your kind of cost envelope on a more regular basis throughout the year have that predictability because you know how big your teams are and how much they cost and what you're doing is changing the work and where it flows to and changing your funding according to that yeah i i worked with the client where they they did exactly that so they reduced from annual to quarterly and the aspiration was to make it shorter again so it's it's it's sort of um it's a it's an iterative approach it was an iterative approach they took and i think it worked well in in that context but it was a sort of um um they would also they would also reduce the overhead so i think you mentioned them here the finance process can be quite time consuming so they they worked actively to kind of reduce the overhead for a quarterly review as opposed to an annual one because otherwise you're you know you're you're quadrupling your workload um and um and yeah as i say unfortunately the time i left they were still on quarterly but i know they were they were looking to increase the frequency of that um there's a couple actually around public sector so how does government fit in an agile context i think people have experienced some frustrations in this area so have we how have we managed our public sector clients um given that their ways of working is maybe not in a particular agile way it's interesting you say that because uh some of the the best projects that i've worked on have been uh public sector projects um so all all projects within government are digital by default now and they adhere to the government digital service standard which are fundamentally aligned to agile manifesto principles um the government and government agencies and the public sector wide more widely are on a journey towards that so there will be frustrations from people in certain deliveries along those lines but if you think about what gds the government digital service standard is trying to do it's time to try to protect protect the public purse by making sure we're having a small incremental delivery of value and making sure we're delivering the right thing because if we are delivering the right thing and we know that sooner we can stop the things that aren't right and protect public money so underpinning all of that are many uh standards as you'd expect in how to work which are based on the agile manifesto principles so in actual fact a lot as i say many of the best projects we work on are public sector projects and i think what's probably worth adding here is that they're not just applied to software delivery there is a service element to it there is also a product element there is a ux design element to that so it is really an all-encompassing view of the those principles and how they apply which is impressive yeah and i think we've got time for just one more so um doesn't emergent architecture and requirements lead to frankenstein systems and endless delivery okay so i think i think for me that's a that's kind of a bit of a misinterpretation of the the actual um principle itself so the the the kind of secret source i find within delivery is by involving teams in the formation of the work that delivers the service so identifying those user needs and user requirements if you will and finding the optimal way to solve those problems so for me emergent architecture and emergent requirements doesn't mean it pops up willy-nilly throughout delivery there's a degree of pragmatism that needs to be applied you know certainly so our principles are solid architectural foundations up front to enable you to build for the future change so it's about interpretation of that element of the manifesto rather than emergent as it just pops up and appears as you go through it's yes you are going to find change but you have to be building on a solid foundation from the start i think people are still on so i've got time for just one more question does the agile manifest only change to adapt to new team roles which have emerged in the last 10 years eg service designers ux as user researchers and i mentioned this one because obviously something that we have with with spark so so what is everybody's thoughts on that i think that's a great question i mean this is really going back to the original intention of the manifesto it is a set of principles it isn't a role matrix applied to an organization it's not there to do that so there has been and there will be in the future even newer roles that would uh evolve and and come into the world of delivering good things in the right way in at the right time um so i think you can translate that question in terms of do we need new scrum rules to adapt for ux designer that is a another question or do we need new roles in safe but these are frameworks the manifesto itself is as a principles and i think there is a clear distinction between those two things um there will be neurals and they will need to find a home you know are we how do we use a good ux designer in the context of delivering what is right for the user within the cost constraints that we have that is a valid question but yeah yeah i was going to say in my experience working with service design and user experience teams i think that's actually fit in really well with agile delivery so it brings it into that product focused user-centric way of delivering things um and it puts much more emphasis on it i think left to their own devices software delivery teams and i'll raise my hand for this one as well we tend to focus on technology and not necessarily the user experience and the user requirement so kind of having that front and foremost and having someone there who will hold you accountable to it and say well actually no this is what the research shows this is what our design shows you know this is how we develop this i actually think the two marry really really well together so no there isn't a formal role within maybe scrum or any of those but i think maybe there should be so i think we are coming to the end of the session there are a few questions that we've not managed to get through but i'm sure david and the team will be happy to follow up if i send them on um is there anyone that likes to add anything else before we close today um just for me just to say uh if you do want to ask any of those questions or any others i recommend you join your local agile meetups uh you know they're a great source of information and a great opportunity to meet like-minded people so uh do do reach out to your local uh agile communities and i do i will be sending a um follow up with the recording so there'll be any links in there that anyone you know leave you've got any suggestions i can put those in the follow-up email not a problem um and yeah thank you so much for joining us today i really enjoyed that session you