3. Agile Methodology

Agile Value and Principle

• Business Agility Values
  1. Customer success over internal KPIs
  2. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  3. Validated learning over opinions and conventions
     • Validated learning is used in scrum.
     • It is a unit of progress process and describes learnings generated by trying out an initial idea and then measuring it against potential customers to validate the effect.
     • Each test of an idea is a single iteration in a larger process of many iterations whereby something is learnt and then applied to succeeding tests.
     • Typical steps in validated learning:
       1. Specify a goal
       2. Specify a metric that represents the goal
       3. Act to achieve the goal
       4. Analyse the metric
       5. Improve and try again
  4. Frequent iterative increments over big bang introductions
  5. Responding to chance over following a plan
  6. Psychological safety over compliance

• Business Agility Principles
  1. Our highest priority is to help our customers succeed
  2. We welcome change as a source of competitive advantage
  3. Experiment and learn rapidly to deliver increments of value early and often
  4. Collaborate daily with the people required to deliver customer value
  5. Build teams of motivated individuals. Create a safe environment, encourage risk taking, and trust them to get the job done
  6. The most effective method of conveying information to and within a team is face to face conversation
  7. Measure success through validated learning from the customer
  8. Promote a sustainable workload
  9. Excellence in execution enhances business agility
  10. Deciding what NOT to do is essential
  11. The best business results emerge from self-organizing teams
  12. Reflect and adapt behaviours on a regular cadence to become more effective

• Agile Mindset 101 Guiding Principles
  1. Deliver VALUE early and often
  2. Optimize FLOW to deliver faster
     • The point is not hitting a deadline but how quickly we are moving towards our goals
  3. Drive QUALITY with fast feedback

Iterative Thinking

• Being iterative means that you make your way through work by repeatedly processing a limited number of steps, with each successive pass brining you closer to your end goal
• Benefit:
  1. Ensuring a product or process is the best solution possible
  2. When applied in the early stage, significant cost savings are possible
  3. Serious misunderstandings are exposed early in the lifecycle, when it’s possible to react to them
  4. Enables and encourages user feedback, and to elicit the project’s real requirement
  5. More effectively involves the client in the complexities that often surround the design process
  6. Team is forced to focus on those issues that are most critical to the project, and shielded from issues that distract and divert them from the project’s real risks
  7. Continual testing enables an objective assessment of the project’s status
  8. Inconsistencies among requirements, designs, and implementations are detected early
  9. The workload of the team is spread out more evenly throughout the lifecycle
  10. Enables the team to leverage lessons learned, and therefore to continually improve the process
  11. Stakeholders have concrete evidence of the project’s status throughout the lifecycle

Prioritisation

• Deciding what NOT to do is essential
• Prioritisation techniques:
  1. MoSCow (Must, Should, Could, Won’t)
     • Share and agree the definitions of the MosCow prioritization levels with the team
     • Helps select the initial increment by creating a list of the genuine “must have” requirements
  2. HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion aka “expert” opinion)
     • Whatever the HiPPO thinks is the most important task gains pripority
  3. Classes of Service (Level of service with different responses)
     • Policies that reflect prioritization based on the different risks and business value
       1. Expedite: First item to be pulled
       2. Fixed delivery date: External deadline
       3. Standard
       4. Intangible: Typically for internal purpose and not focusing on the customer
  4. Value divided by Effort (Cost/benefit ratio)
     • Cost of Delay (Calculate the cost or opportunity loss of not doing something)
     • Cost of Delay divided by Duration
       • Priority = Cost of Delay / Dream Duration

Building Psychological Safety

1. Getting started to know one another
2. Check how is the team feeling
3. Establish meeting safety
   • Making meetings a safe space to encourage speaking up with idea, questions, and concerns
4. Normalize conflict
   • Plan for conflict and share team preferences to make it safer when it happens
5. Safety via Feedback
   • Feedback given with good intent helps build trust and create strong relationships
6. Encourage All voices to be heard
   • High engagement and participation requires safety
7. Show Vulnerability
   • Being open and showing vulnerability helps build trust and create a safe space within a team

Story Mapping

• Use simple maps to visualize the stories you tell about your projects
• Components in story mapping:
  1. Users
  2. User Tasks
  3. Goal-Level
  4. Activities
  5. Narrative Flow
  6. Details (Sub-tasks, Alternative tasks, Exceptions, Details)
• Story Map Process
  1. Frame (Before mapping, create a short product or feature brief)
  2. Map the Big Picture
  3. Explore (Fill the body of the story map by breaking down larger user tasks into smaller subtasks and user interface details)
  4. Slice Out Viable Releases
     • Slice the map into holistic product releases
     • For each release, name the target outcomes and impact
  5. Slice Out a Development Strategy

Self-Organising & Self-Managing Teams

• Agile Values and Principles: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• A self-organising team is a group of motivated individuals who have a common purpose, owns their work, and has the authority to make decisions (empowering) on the work they are doing
• Benefits of self-organisation:
  1. Promotes ownership
  2. Boosts motivation
  3. Foster trust
  4. Drive innovation
  5. Leads to high performing teams
• Self-Management refers to:
  1. Team self-determines their own backlog of work and prioritizes it
  2. Teams are working as if there is no manger

Define and Align Goals with OKRs

• Objectives and Key Results (OKR) is a powerful goal-setting methodology that drives alignment, performance, and results in growing and high-performing companies
• In short, to align and engage everyone at the company around measurable goals
• Benefits of OKRs:
  1. Alignment (Everyone is aligning to the top corporate objectives)
  2. Clarity & Focus (Everyone is clear with their defined goals and focus on the things that matter the most)
  3. Improve Continuous Learning (Learning and improvement that drive better results)
  4. Accountability
  5. Transparency
  6. Accelerate Results
• Output (Tasks we do) does not equal to Outcome (Value we create)

KANBAN 101

• A kanban board is to visualise the workflow
  • Can provide insight into the current position and identify problems in the process
• 6 basic principles
  1. Visualise Workflow
  2. Limit work in progress
  3. Measure and Manage Flow
  4. Make policies explicit (Transparency)
  5. Reflect often for continuous improvement
  6. Implement feedback loops
• Basic Measurement Tools
  1. Cycle Time
     • From when the team pulls to production
  2. Lead Time
     • From idea to production
  3. Cumulative Flow Diagram
     • Shows total number of items “Not Done”, “In Progress”, and “Completed”
• Work in Progress (WIP) Limits
  • A WIP limit is a constraint put on the number of work items to be worked on by a team at any one time
  • The use of a pull system and the reduction of batch sizes aim to help control the flow
  • Adding WIP limits are probably the most effective way to smooth flow and reduce cycle times and increase quality