I’ve recently read some academic research around the importance of being ‘struck’ during reflexivity as part of leadership development (Corlett 2012). This research considers how you may have striking experiences that stop you in your tracks or give you that light bulb moment. The reflexive learning comes when you reflect on those moments and learn from them. This is key in leadership as we constantly have to be aware of the relationships and experiences we have with our teams. This week I’ve had several moments where I have been struck. Let me share them.

Priorities

I joined a call with one of my extended teams where we were discussing the results of their recent employee engagement survey. We were sharing the findings with the team and discussing what we could do to improve in some of the areas of employee engagement. One of them being worklife balance. One of the team stopped me in my tracks and told me I was wrong and it should infact be LIFEwork balance. This gave me one of those striking moments, where it became obvious that he was right. To achieve worklife balance, we actually had to create LIFEwork balance. The generalistic goal of this has always been supporting and ensuring our people have that balance in their life, but to use the term worklife balance, does seem to be focusing on the wrong priority.

This has now been added to my organisational mission. Henceforth this will be identified as LIFEwork balance.

Dispensable and Valuable

Another striking moment happened this week during a conversation with one of the team who had been approached by an account lead and was told that we had to give their team pay rises as they were critical to their business and we needed to retain them. I agree that we need to do this when it matters and pick our battles, but during this conversation I was struck by the number of times they used the word critical in the conversation. Thinking about this made me realise that we are actually making our people more critical by doing this. Surely we should be making our people dispensable, so we can move them onto better and more fulfilling work, rather than keeping them ring fenced into the same role for years at a time. I realised that perhaps rather than rewarding our people, we are holding them back. What we really need to make them is dispensable to their role and then more valuable and give them better opportunities to grow and expand their development.

Reflecting on this further made me think about succession plans and rotations. This seems like the most logical way to effectively give our people the best opportunity for development by widening their experiences and ultimately the value to us as a business.

There are many techniques available to support succession planning for example, the 9 box grid model, where we look at people’s performance and potential and we have used that technique regularly. However, if I am being completely honest, did we ever fully act on those succession plans? Perhaps we did sometimes, but perhaps we didn’t as we had ‘critical’ things that needed to be done by our ‘critical’ people and if we moved them on, then we couldn’t achieve what we needed.

One of the things that this technique doesn’t do, is capture value to the account, their team and their capability. We are now going off and figuring out how we can capture and identify this value. From there we are looking at how we can grow this value. Do we need to have a better use of rotations, job sharing, shadowing, on the job training, coaching etc. This is the challenge that we are looking at now. Unless we start taking this 100% serious and making our people dispensable, but valuable, I don’t think we will ever get out of the ‘critical’ situations. This will help us better reward those that are valuable to our business and encourage more self development within our teams as well as give opportunities to others to develop and progress their careers and ultimately add to their own value.

The Power of Collaboration

I’ve always been lucky to work with my team and am truly thankful to all of them for what they do for me, their colleagues and the business. Over the last few weeks I have been incredibly lucky to have had the opportunity to work with 2 amazing and inspirational colleagues from around the global business; Lori Lewis (Global Application Offerings leader in the US) and Anna Melina Faude (Consulting team in Germany).

We came together due to a common interest; our passion for driving a Culture of Innovation and we were asked to present a talk to the global sales and solutioning team around how to drive the Culture.

Over a month or so of planning this presentation, we have been meeting regularly, having striking discussions that have left me incredibly inspired. When you witness the power of collaboration in action where we are all motivating and encouraging, supportive and enabling and all working to the same goal that we deeply care about, you can really see something special happening – many striking moments !

We delivered our presentation this week and had each taken a section to work on around different facets of innovation. Until actually presenting, we had never walked through the talk end to end. However, what came out of that call was a cohesive, articulate and collaborative experience. It made me realise, we are onto something! Innovation can often mean many things to different people, but ultimately creating the culture for innovation to flourish and grow always comes from the same things… our people, giving them the opportunity to be creative, to develop those core values, provide the training, tools and time and empower them.

This week has been incredibly inspiring, motivating and full of learnings and opportunities to develop. Can’t wait until next week!

Grateful

Last week was my 20 year work anniversary as a continued employee of the company. The CEO, VPs and company name may have changed many times due to the multiple mergers and acquisitions and my own job title has changed even more, but ultimately I am still as grateful and thankful for the opportunity to be part of something pretty fantastic!

My early days as a Cobol programmer introduced me to lots of good people who shaped my work ethics, values and beliefs. I picked up many lessons and skills from the vast experience that my colleagues brought. In truth, I was in awe of those early colleagues who were so knowledgeable and experienced and just knew a lot of stuff. I remember wondering whether I would ever remember all of the acronyms, never mind understand the business and technology. As with a lot of engineers and developers as soon as you get any good at the techie side of things, you are given a management role and are no longer hands on. Although I do strongly believe that every manager or leader still needs to be tech savvy and aware of innovations and technology, even if you don’t get your hands dirty cutting code.

Being a leader and manager of people totally changes you. To be accountable and responsible for someone else’s development, career, livelihood and happiness is a huge responsibility and one that should never be taken lightly. It may sound cliche, but always treat people like you would want to be treat. Have empathy, be kind, give people time and really listen to them. Even if you can’t help, at least they know their voice was heard.

There have been so many people who have made an impression on me as a leader, engineer, manager, colleague, friend and human being. You cannot fail to be affected by the people we meet on our professional journey. They inspire and motivate as well as support and guide. You often learn what not to do from others’ mistakes and not so good behaviours as well as the positive and effective actions. We all need to be mindful that the next generation workforce will be looking at us and we will be helping to shape and form their work values. When you are in a position of influence, you need to be conscious that others will be looking at you to be their role model and this is a huge responsibility.

Thankful

Everyone goes through personal and professional challenges, but in particular the last 18 months has been the most difficult of any time in recent history. The world has changed in ways that we could not have imaged at the start of 2020. I am incredibly thankful that my life was not devastated by the pandemic and that I still have a wonderful family, good job, nice home and loyal and kind friends.

Resilience and adaptability have been on full show in the last 18 months. We have all found new and different ways to deliver business. We have all adapted to new ways of working in a virtual and remote environment. Our customers and partners have adapted too. The business world has a whole new set of norms. Now we are in a recovery mode and we are seeing a whole bunch of challenges. In particular, insufficient number of skilled resources. I really don’t think that CEOs and business leaders understand the impact this is having and I am 100% certain it will get more difficult before it gets easier. We need to be creative with hiring. Look for new workforces that wouldn’t have previously been hired. Give people a chance and train them. If businesses don’t get creative, they might not survive. The jobs market is very strong if you are looking for a job and have good skills, not so good news if you are trying to hire.

Hopeful

Last week has also seen some new beginnings as well as reflections on the past. I started an MSc in Strategic Leadership. Formal leadership training for me is long overdue, as I mentioned previously, my leadership beliefs and behaviours came from learning from others and using common sense and decency. Our company onboarded 200 graduate early career professionals this week. I had the great pleasure to speak to them as part of their onboarding activities and welcome them to the company. I hope that they listened to my story, saw the possibilities and were inspired to learn, develop and grow their skills into the engineers and leaders of the future. I can’t wait to see where their stories take them. They have a great deal of responsibility on their shoulders. However, it is impossible for anyone to predict with any great certainty what that future of work will bring, but businesses need to start thinking about the future today.

During the onboarding for my leadership course, I was lucky to hear a lecture from a partner of the University, NetPositives Futures who are a group that support and educate businesses and individuals in how to create a Sustainable future. This company have also developed a Sustainable Development Goals software tool that helps businesses and individuals understand and plan for a responsible and ethical future. I am sure we all want to be responsible citizens both personally and professionally and we need to ask ourselves what can we do to support a better future for our world. The decisions, beliefs and actions we have as individuals as well as the strategies we make as companies will have a direct influence on the future of our world for us and for the generations to come.

The picture below shows us the 17 Sustainable Development Goals that we all need to think about whether we are making decisions as individuals or within our organisation.

Which Sustainable Development Goals are important to you as an individual and as a professional?

How can we make better decisions to support achieving positive outcomes from the goals? It is very easy for companies to tell the market that they are responsible corporate citizens, but we need to make sure that we really do turn the goals into tangible actions and results in order to give our next generation the opportunities we have.

There is no excuse for businesses to make the changes needed and there is help e.g. NetPositive Futures and The Institute of Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability (ICRS). Please take time to look at this and think about your personal contribution and what changes you need to make to support sustainable development. I’ve already been around a whiteboard with some of my team to think about how we bring sustainability goals to the heart of what we do as a team. I am sure I will be sharing our story, experiences, lessons, success and failures as we go.

Let’s start today in making a difference for tomorrow and planning now for a sustainable and exciting future for our new colleagues who have just started their careers.

Dev Ops brings the software development and software operations together, usually delivered by the same people rather than the handoffs in traditional IT deliveries between the delivery teams to the operations teams.

Dev Ops has been around for quite a while now and brings with it many benefits including :

• better team and stakeholder collaboration;
• quicker time to develop and deploy software (faster return on investment);
• save time on incident resolution
• reliable and robust deliveries;
• better customer satisfaction;
• innovative tooling;
• integration with software as infrastructure;
• reduces risk through automation;
• complements agile approaches to project delivery;
• operational intelligence;
• continuous improvement with feedback loops.

Today’s virtual world necessitates for security to be across all areas of our IT systems. Protecting digital assets is critical to ensure the integrity of systems and data.

Cyber crime is becoming more and more sophisticated as hackers get smarter and more vicious with their attacks. There are many threats to IT security including malware and malicious software which can cripple a business if the digital terrorist is successful with their attack.

A business could suffer many ways, for example a successful Ransomware attack would bring a business or service trading to a standstill and have different types of financial implication due to the ransom payment as well as losing the ability to trade or carry on with business and services. This can have life threatening impacts for example, where a ransomware attack is made to a health provider. There are many other outcomes of a cyber attack including data breach, access to secure information, reputational damage etc.

Wrapping security around every aspect of delivery puts the Sec into DevSecOps.

Dev Sec Ops Roadmap

When a business decides that it will move into a Dev Sec Ops model there are a number of areas that require consideration including

• People
• Practices and Processes
• Tooling
• Agile Methods
• Growth and Scale

People

Adopting DevSecOps starts with a Mindset change. Thinking differently and being open to working in new ways is critical for the success of a DevSecOps model.

Once our people are willing to adopt and accept DevSecOps there are a number of things to introduce:

• Upskilling and multiskilling your team in the latest DevSecOps technology (look at online training, on the job, technology partners often provide free training)
• Create T and X shaped technical resources and develop their soft skills including communication, pitching, influencing
• Build cross functional, non-siloed teams
• Hire some experts to mentor and coach the team. Build up and scale the team around the experts
• Hire some future gurus who have high learnability
• Build the future workforce via relationships with technical universities. Get high potential students excited and interested in the possibilities of the company and show them how they can develop their career
• Provide an option for collaborative environments that promote creativity and innovative thinking (whiteboards, standup space, design thinking space, UX labs). Even in the post pandemic environment, occasional face to face collaboration is important to foster the team collaboration and culture.
• Create and enviable work culture where ideas and feedback are listened to and the team feel they can blossom.
• Jointly build a “work mojo” career and motivational development plan for each team member to identify and work on what really motivates and engages the team members as individuals.

Practices and Processes – Continuous Everything

DevSecOps focuses on the continuous improvements and automation of software deliveries. No DevSecOps model is complete without considering the following :

• Implement effective code and version control systems. This will allow for a Continuous Development model. Solid configuration management tooling will track, merge and manage code being developed. Tooling will be able to analyse code and identify and resolve issues and logical code bugs.
• Continuous Automated Testing can bring huge improvements to quality and speed of deliveries. Every line of code that is written can be automatically tested. Taking a Test Driven Development approach also puts testing at the heart of the delivery.
• Continuous Integration will bring all of the code being developed together into the main code branch / repository regularly and allow for continuous testing to also happen to ensure that no code integration has impacted the quality of the product.
• Continuous Delivery automatically promotes code changes to a pipeline environment ready for deployment. The code will be deemed ready for deployment, but not actually deployed automatically. The decision can then be made to move deliveries into production.
• Continuous Deployment will automate the code deliveries into production. This allows for small incremental deployments to be made regularly.
• Continuous monitoring provides tooling, dashboards and tracking of the code products in operations and infrastructure for any issues, bugs, failures or incidents. This will provide a feedback loop that will help identify opportunities for future improvements to be made as well as potentially provide intelligent self healing for defects.
• Infrastructure As Code will automate the creation of environments to host the code releases.
• Security throughout all of the phases of dev ops security needs to be a key consideration from development of the business code, testing, code control, delivery, deployment and monitoring. There are lots of security policies and practices that can be included e.g. threat modelling, encryption etc.

Most of today’s DevSecOps model is involve in the journey to the cloud. However, the journey should not end once you are up and running in a cloud environment. A true progressive model with constantly think about the strategy “in” the cloud and “beyond” the cloud.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is very similar to DevSecOps processes. An SRE would focus on taking elements of software development and making continuous improvements to operations and infrastructure. An SRE would look at making efficiencies and improvements tp monitoring, system availability, capacity planning, incident handling, system monitoring etc.

Tooling

As DevSecOps is primarily around the automation of the software development life cycle, this is enabled by the DevSecOps toolchain.

All of the tools involved are there to automate the various phases of the lifecycle. They also bring accuracy, speed and quality improvements. The following shows a sample of tools used at various DevOps lifecycle stages (as shown in the diagram above).

The DevSecOps toolchain is constantly improving and increasing. In particular, Opensource software can provide many solutions to problems for the DevSecOps environment. Care must be taken however, to ensure that opensource software does not bring any vulnerabilities to a system.

Agile

One of the best complements to a DevSecOps model is to introduce Agile delivery methods. There are several different agile methodologies depending on what you are delivery, the size and scale of your project and the type of project. Agile, Kanban, Scrum, SAFe, Nexus, etc. are all different flavours of agile and they may be more suited to the type of different types of projects.

If your team is new to Agile and you are looking to implement a DevSecOps approach then one of the first things you need to do is get your team trained in Agile and hire an Agile Coach to guide you through the early days of agile adoption. The coach will be able to support your team as follows:

• Set up the Agile tooling e.g. Jira to get the most out of the tool and to support the team who may be new to using agile methods
• Establish the scrum team roles and responsibities including scrum master and team members. Also, help understand the relationship with the product owners and their responsibilities in helping define and shape the backlog priorities
• Establish the initial agile ceremonies to be performed during the project e.g. sprint planning, retrospectives, standups, sprint reviews, show and tells
• Help support the scrum master if they are new to the role to change their mindset and be a servant leader who is enabling the scrum team and removing blockers
• Introduce best practices e.g. the right questions to ask at the stand up ie what went well? what are your blockers, what help do you need?
• Guide inexperienced scrum teams through specific activities e.g. estimation and sizing, spikes, backlog refinement, definition of ready and done, user stories writing etc.

See other blogs on this site on more detailed discussions around Agile.

Growth and Scale

As a product or service grows, managing within one scrum team may not be practical and you may want to look at scaling out.  There are many methods of scaled agile, but to keep things simple as a small business grows implementing a scrum of scrums model can be very effective to support daily decisions and priorities across all scrum teams, cross team support and collaboration as well as an effective way for the delivery leader to appreciate the key issues, successes or deliverables across all of the teams.

As the business scales further other more complex models could be introduced e.g. tribes (groups of linked scrum teams working on a portfolio), squads (another name for scrum teams), chapters  (capability based groups), guilds (interest and innovation groups).  Examples of more complex models include the Spotify model, Nexus and SAFe.

Adoption

Bringing a robust DevSecOps model to an enterprise is not easy and there are many aspects to getting the right model, tooling, processes etc. for each individual business, but hopefully this has given you lots to think about if you are looking to develop a DevSecOps adoption plan for your business.

You know that feeling when you’ve plucked up the courage to take the plunge and go for a ride on the rollercoaster. You’re a little excited, anxious, scared, worried, but ultimately full of anticipation for the ride. You might think about the risks and ask yourself is it dangerous, will I get hurt or will it make me sick? Yet, you still climb aboard. The ride starts and your are hopeful and excited, as it slowly creeps to the top of the first ledge and you know what’s coming next. Then it happens and you whizz back down at a great speed and your stomach leaps and jumps around and as soon as you are down you fly right back up and do it all again, looping the loop, rising up and falling right back down again, but then it slows down and ends at a steady rate and you calmly get off, albeit with wobbly legs, but a sense of enjoyment and satisfaction wanting to do it all over again.

When people say “life is a rollercoaster”, it really is. Work and projects are the same.

The trick has got to be how to make the work rollercoaster ride a joyful and positive experience rather than a terrifying nightmare ride.

If your work rollercoaster ride is dangerous and scary, then at some point you have to accept you need to try a different ride something more gentle and predictable like the merry-go-round or thunder mountain (for the Disney fans). You physically cannot keep riding the rough ride repeatedly.

In my opinion, the work rollercoaster journey is driven by the culture and leadership style.

I’ve seen a great response from my team this week on how positive, encouraging and supportive leadership has brought an energy and buzz. It has been truly amazing to be part of this journey. This has been a perfect example of creating the right culture and bringing out the passion and drive from everyone, tapping into the strengths of each individual and creating synergy.

We Do Things Because They Are Difficult

I was incredibly lucky to witness a live rocket launch a couple of years ago when I visited the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. Truly one of the best experiences of my geeky life. One of the biggest take aways from the tour of the space centre was listening to a video display of the JFK speech when he spoke about the Apollo missions where he said “We don’t do things because they are easy, we do them because they are hard”. That resonated with me so much. The work we were doing at the time had us reaching for and discovering new frontiers and new worlds of technology. And yes, it wasn’t easy, if it was then someone would have already done it. We were doing it and it was hard. But, we have some incredibly talented, passionate and clever people and they did it. Then they did it again and again and are still going. Still solving problems that are not easy.

IT and innovation is often an unknown. We know that there are problems that need solving and we know we can solve them (eventually). Sometimes it takes longer than we thought or we hit issues we couldn’t have planned or anticipated. How we act as leaders and how we drive our teams to deal with these new frontiers, unknowns and complex problems and the culture and environment we create and foster for them are so important. Do we take our team on the exciting and exhilarating rollercoasters or the fearful, terrifying and sickening rides. As leaders that is our responsibility to make sure that we always build our version of Disneyland or Kennedy Space Centre so that our people can leave happy having learned something, dealt with the challenges and had a good happy time in the process.

When we are forced or force our teams to take the scary nightmare ride, it makes us sick and we and will want to to get off and buy another ticket for the exhilarating ride. Hopefully we can find one of those tickets … if not, there’s always stub hub 😊

I think it’s fair to say that it’s been a while since I updated this site… sorry! Like most people the last year has been ‘interesting’ and ‘challenging’ to say the least. The pandemic hit, we never left our house and we haven’t been back in the office in over a year.

Despite getting through the last year in one piece, looking back it has not been plain sailing. So what’s happened since I last typed?

Service Line

Another re-organisation, a bigger role and 12 months sitting in the corner of a room in my house and then last Summer, we became a service line.

“What’s a service line?” I hear you ask.

Basically, it’s a capability based organisation that has end to end responsibility for a technology stack.

In other words, my team expanded from 500 or so people to almost 2,000. The scope of work changed from only project delivery to now cover pre-sales, solutioning, delivery and operations. The technology stack expanded and grew from Digital Transformation, Core Applications Development and Testing, Oracle and SAP to now also include Service Now, Workday and Salesforce. As well as a local UK & Ireland team I became responsible for Applications in Middle East and Africa too (including the most amazing team in Egypt). I got a new manager, spent the year trying to predict the organisation’s finance and am still trying to take out cost.

Now we are about to hit another org change, I’m getting a new manager and maybe, possibly, slightly changing my role ?!?!

As I said to some of my team today, “It’s time to get out of this funk!”

Beyond The Cloud

Sometimes things happen for a reason. “Serendipity (DTC word of the year 2019)”. That’s what today felt like, serendipitous! Things just fell into place. One conversation led into the next and it all came together at the end of day team call.

We were brainstorming and talking through how we approach a challenge and then it happened! We decided to get out of the funk! Infact, those are the words I used.

Maybe I’ve been too focused on financials, Brexit planning and monthly business reviews in the last year, but I’ve not been so close to the actual coal face of delivery and innovation except for the red projects (we won’t talk about them). That changed today…

Ok, so we have done digital transformation, moved to the cloud, stabilised and automated … what next? What is beyond the cloud? How do we take IT to the next level? We have a plan to find out.

We’ve got our best minds working on it, pulling together a team who will analyse, look at data, look at latest technology and see how we can add TRUE value to the business, not because we can take out cost and heads, but because it’s the right thing to do, to really bring more value for our clients. We’ve moved from mainframes to data centres to cloud and platforms. Now we are pioneering again, discovering new frontiers.

Today I remembered the passion and innovation and what truly has always inspired me about IT and it feels good!

Many people have the idea that moving to agile methodologies from traditional waterfall will bring chaos where decisions change by the minute and no one knows what is going on.  Infact, it’s quite the opposite – if done correctly.

We have more useful governance using Agile approaches than we had wasteful using Waterfall.

Based on our experience, successful adoption of Agile can be achieved and here are things to consider.

Prep The People

The first success factor of adopting Agile is getting your team onboard.  If your people aren’t prepared to put their doubts to one side then you will be doomed to fail.  Making the mindset change can be very difficult for experienced professionals, but it can be done.

Give all of your team the right training from day one.  Make sure they understand :

• The responsibilities and expectations of every role within the team including Product Owner, Scrum Master, Engineering team members and understand who the stakeholders are.
• Have everyone speaking the same language.  Make sure terminology is clearly defined and understood.
• Be clear about the agile ceremonies including sprint planning, retrospectives, stand ups, show and tells, estimation exercises etc.  Ensure everyone knows the part they play in the ceremonies.
• Add a backlog item to each sprint for ‘Team Training’ so time is allocated to give the team the chance to develop new skills as they go depending on the learnings from each sprint.

What’s Your Problem?

Have a clear business outcome to solve and break it down into specific achievable problem statements.

Break down the Problem Statement so you have a good idea of how you will solve the problem – this will help define and develop your backlog epics and user stories.

An Epic is a large block of work that has a common objective.  It could be a feature, request or requirement.

If there are more than 5 user stories for the same project area then you should have an Epic defined and link the user stories to the Epic.

A User Story is a short and simple description of a feature told from the perspective of the person who desires the new feature…

As a <type of user>, I want <a goal> so that <a reason>.

User Stories can be sized and estimated.  A Story Point value should be assigned to each user story based on it’s complexity and size, so the team can gauge what work will fit within a sprint. For example, a team might be able to clear 50 story points per sprint and if you know the story points allocated to each user story the team will be able to effectively plan the content for that sprint.

Work with your stakeholders to develop your team ‘Definition of Done’ and know what your success factors are.

A Definition of Done is a shared understanding of what it means for work to be complete and can cover either the release, a product increment or a user story.

When a Product Backlog item or an Increment is described as “Done”, everyone must understand what “Done” means.  (Scrum Guide)

Keep your Definition of Done on your scrum board so everyone has a visible reminder of what you are trying to do.  Also, be prepared for the Definition of Done to evolve throughout the life of your project.  Review this as part of the sprint retrospective ceremony.

Your product backlog items will be “Ready” to be included in sprint planning.  The Definition of Ready is linked to having  good user stories that are actionable and understanding what it means for them to be “Done”.  Sometimes it’s not possible to have all of the information up front for user stories to be deemed as “Ready”, but it will give you a good chance to have a successful sprint.

Think About Your Framework

Once you’ve decided to adopt Agile, it doesn’t stop there.  The next question should be what type of Agile framework should you use for the best fit for what you are trying to deliver.

Kanban, Scrum, SAFe, Nexus, Pragmatic Agile are all good options, but don’t all fit with every scenario.  Pick the best framework for your team and project.

Scrum is very good if you have an end vision to achieve and know what you will be committing to at the end of a sprint.  It recognises that things change and product requirements, technology and risk can be volatile based on what the team learns throughout the project.  Scrum allows the teams to respond to change and be self organised without losing focus on the outcome.

SAFe, Nexus or other scalable frameworks support large delivery of enterprise size software and systems.  It allows for the collaboration, alignment and synchronisation of multiple agile teams.  It views deliveries from different layers including portfolio, programme and individual teams.  It takes advantage of continuous delivery pipelines or an Agile release train.

Kanban allows you to tackle fluid requests and a continuous flow of work.  Understanding the availability capacity of work within the teams is key so as not to overload the team so they become unproductive.  Balancing demand and capacity by setting work in progress limits is the key to making Kanban effective.  Keeping the workflow moving and avoiding bottlenecks is also one of the main focuses within Kanban.

Almost all agile frameworks are well complimented with dev ops, automation and tooling as well as bringing built in quality throughout the project by having multi skilled scrum teams doing pair programming, test driving development and automated testing.

Tooling and Metrics

There is a world of Agile tooling available to teams today and identifying the best one for your delivery should be a priority for any Agile team.

Often the tooling is dependent on the framework that you choose e.g. Kanban frameworks are well suited to using ‘To Do list’ type tooling like Trello or Teams Boards.

More scrum focused deliveries are a good fit for VSTS and Jira where you can take advantage of the metrics around story points, burn down and velocity.

There are some good retrospective tools freely available including Retrium, goReflect etc. which help to document what was learned in the sprint.

Comparing Agile metrics with Waterfall metrics on time, quality, productivity are often one of the best ways to prove to management that moving to Agile has delivered improvements.  However, metrics alone shouldn’t be used by management to come to conclusions on the effectiveness and success of the team.  Metrics need to have context!

The most common metrics used in Agile are …

• Velocity – this is the amount of story points that were moved to Done during the sprint.  Velocity usually improves as teams progress through sprints and as it matures can help with estimating the amount of work (story points) that can be delivered by a team.
• Burndown – shows how quickly the team are burning through the user stories.  It shows the total effort against the amount of work delivered.
• Recidivism – is the ratio of user stories that come back to development.  This might be due to quality failure or changing requirements.
• First-time Pass Rate – is the % of test cases that pass the first time they are run.  Using test automation should help with regression testing of old features to make sure they have not broke with the latest changes.
• Defect Count By Sprint – is the number of defects identified during the sprint.
• Defect Count by Story Points – This is less binary than the defects by sprint count as it looks at the ratio of defects to story points in a sprint.  With sprints that don’t have many story points just counting defects would not give a true reflection on the quality of the delivery.
• Story Completion Ratio – This is the number of stories completed in a sprint compared the number of stories that were planned.
• Story Count Completion Ratio – Looks at what story points were delivered compared to the estimate.
• Blocked Items Count and % – These can be used to understand the number of stories that are blocked and the %.

A Good Product Owner

The Product Owner is the most important role to ensure a successful delivery – FACT.

 The Product Owner is responsible for maximising the value of the product resulting from the work of the scrum team – Scrum Guide 

The most basic definition of a Product Owner is “someone who knows stuff and is empowered to make a decision”.

The Product Owner should fully understand the business and the problem the team are working to fix.   This allows them to make good decisions for the benefit of the project.   They are the link between the client and the scrum team.  They understand the priorities and are involved and available to the team to support, plan, clarify and decide.  A good product owner is involved in sprint planning, reviews and retrospectives.  They can where possible be part of the stand ups too.

Don’t underestimate the value of a good Product Owner.  They can be the critical success factor of an Agile delivery.  If you don’t have a Product Owner who is knowledgeable, empowered and willing and able to spend quality time with the team, the risk of not achieving a successful delivery is increased.

If you haven’t got a good Product Owner – Get One !

Stand Up and Don’t Stand Still

It’s a fact that you spend a lot of time on your feet with Agile.

It isn’t just the daily stand ups that get you up and about, you need to get out of your seat and talk to people.  Collaboration and transparency need to be active in Agile teams.  If you have a blame free culture where your team are not afraid to fail, but take it as a learning opportunity then collaboration and transparency will become part of the team’s DNA.  Don’t stew over a problem on your own, share it with your team and you can collectively overcome the problem.  The sooner you share, the sooner it’s fixed.

Don’t forget to share with the stakeholders too.  There’s nothing worse than waiting until the end of the sprint to let them know that things aren’t going well.  Bring them into the problem – they would rather help fix it than not meet their goal.

Use the sprint retrospective process to reflect on what went well, what didn’t go so well and what you can improve going forward.  The retrospective is an opportunity to discuss  things without blame, criticism or accusation.  These are and should be very positive.  Take it as a team building opportunity.  Think wider than just the sprint.  What improvements can be introduced to the way of working, comms, tooling, collaboration, mentoring, training…  It is a time for the team to collectively improve.

Take The Plunge

Don’t be scared to move to Agile.  Things won’t be perfect, but you have the power to continuously fix things and make them better.   Agile gives you the power to be flexible, but still have a solid framework to support and govern a delivery.  Once you are working in an effective Agile way, it just seems like common sense and you’ll ask yourself why you didn’t take the plunge sooner.

Everyone talks about the digital skills gap. For me it’s a real problem that my team face every day. Trying to grow the workforce in a digital business when some people do not  know who you are and what you do adds an additional layer of difficulty. Competing with other companies to retain our current people and attract new talent is a very frustrating environment for a resourcing lead.

Establishing a relevant corporate and work identity is only one element of getting over the talent attraction minefield. It is becoming more and more relevant as digital leaders to establish a personal digital identity too and show that not only the company is somewhere people want to work, but you are someone people want to work with.

Post Merger Identity

After 18 months of being a new company formed from 2 of the IT service and infrastructure giants, a lot of the potential talent still don’t know our name and our true brand.

I’ve been to many recruitment events and people look at you behind your nice and shiny branded stand and don’t recognise us. People start the discussion with ”What do you do and who are you?”. Our responses are always ”We used to be…”. Then we see the spark of recognition in people’s faces when we mention our previous globally recognised brand – then you can start to have a conversation.

Corporately the CEOs and CIOs know who we are, however still think of us as we used to be.

News flash to the IT talent and the CEOs / CIOs…

We are very different today than we were 18 months ago, both in what we do and who we are.

We are an exciting, dynamic and amazing team of people learning and improving every day and taking our people and clients on an incredible transformation journey.

The digital world does not stay still and we are not only moving with it, but we are giving it a good push on it’s way.

Retaining Staff – Loyalty Is All About The Culture

All IT digital companies are in competition for IT talent…. FACT!

With the right skills like Dev Ops, Agile, Automation, Cloud, Robotics an engineer or agile delivery lead can be king or queen in the jobs market.

We sit in some amazing locations across the UK and the globe, but so do other similar companies.  We also have more varied competitors now…

• Our historic competitors  – the large scale and mega IT companies
• Small and Medium IT software houses – (let’s be friends and work together – call me!)
• Public Sector – DWP, BPDTS, HMRC – pushing up the market salary rates (why is my tax pound being used to pay such over the top market rates?)
• Internal IT – insourcing is real when development is less about lines of code and more about graphical interface tooling and ‘ready to go’ IT

Culture vs Cash

We have invested a lot of effort in creating a place where people want to work and most of that was done by listening to the team and what would make the difference to them including training, mentoring, learning from experienced people, freedom to innovate, health and wellbeing time, new and interesting assignments, recognition from their colleagues etc.  Interestingly the one condition that is usually mentioned last is salary.  This only becomes top of the agenda when people are attracted to a competitor for more money.  Even when they get offered highly salaries elsewhere they usually don’t want to leave us and we need to fix that.

Attracting Staff – Is All About Being Different and Surprising

My team have been working on creating an enviable workplace culture for the last couple of years and if we can get people through the door and into the building we know they will want to join us.

Our goal is to make people want to work with us or inspiring them to make their work culture and environment like ours.

The difficulty lies in getting people through the door to see how good it is here.

Attracting new talent is really difficult with so much competition… FACT!

The digital resourcing manager needs to be creative in today’s competitive environment. We cannot wait for people to knock on our door announcing they have arrived.  We need to find them, show them what we are about and guide them through their journey to their Career and Dream Job.  There are lots of different streams of workforce now to hire from  including …

• Traditional experienced permanent hires
• Early career apprentices, interns and graduates
• Dedicated digital training/hiring companies
• Tapping into the Autistic workforce – they can be amazing in an IT work environment with small adaptations to support them in their role
• Ex armed forces looking for their next career
• Part retired experienced hires – who are a little bored in their retirement and want to get back into work – they have so much to bring to the workforce especially upskilling and mentoring the early career hires
• People with potential from non standard backgrounds who have passion and learnability – we have brought into our company people from many diverse backgrounds including a nursery nurse, chefs, carers, catering etc. who have been amazing

Without a good career brand reputation it is difficult to break people’s preconceived ideas.  I recently asked the team to consider sharing their reviews of working for us on Glassdoor – being honest and truthful and representing what we are today.  We did actually get some good reviews.  One of the team later saw a comment on an online article about our company saying “They had noticed we were getting some positive reviews and the management must have forced their staff to post or they were fake comments”.  We didn’t!  The reviews were positive, but truthful and constructive.

Creating Your Own Digital Identity

Everyone is surrounded by brands and we all have our favourites including Apple, Microsoft, Starbucks, Lego, Amazon, local business, regional brands etc.  In the digital world People are also brands and what they put out in the ether on their social media presence is increasingly important.

We have done some research with the  leadingedgeforum.com on the 21st Century Human and having a Digital Mindset, Skillset and Identity.  Take a look at their site for more information on their fascinating work.

To be a credible digital leader you need to show your team and clients that you understand their problems and can help them.  Speaking the same digital language is the first step.  Understanding the terminology to be able to have a meaningful authentic conversation is so important.  As leaders we might not have all of the minute detail, but you do need to be able to ‘get it’ and enable the team so they ‘totally get it’.

In the digital world you can’t afford for your team to be in catch up mode, you need to keep reinventing to be relevant and rather than being told what to do, you need to decide what needs to be done ahead of time to hold onto any competitive advantage.

Final Thoughts …

The Digital world is so much part of our DNA now.  It is central to us all from the moment we wake up (I bet almost everyone uses their phone or digital assistant as their morning alarms), all through the day with, online banking, online shopping, booking a holiday, TV, entertainment, social contact and communication, relaxation, exercise tracking, digital assistants etc to our falling asleep reading a Kindle or listening to an Audible book at bedtime or using a mindfulness app to meditate and read you to sleep.

The largest part of our waking digital day we spend at work and we a have a responsibility to our teams to make that time as enjoyable, meaningful, full of learning and development and productive as possible so we can retain and attract the right people.

I was recently talking to an Agile Coach who was visiting the Digital Transformation Centre, about how we apply agile techniques to our projects.  I mentioned to him how we were far from being scrum purists, but instead we were quite pragmatic about what techniques and approaches we applied to the different types of deliveries using a common sense approach including …

• Scrum
• Kanban
• Mega Kanban
• Uber Scrum
• Safe
• Nexus
• Scrum of scrums

When I mentioned our Pragmatic approach, he said ”you do realise that Pragmatic Agile is an actual approach”.  Of course I didn’t, I just thought it was us applying common sense and trying to use the best techniques that fitted what we were trying to achieve.

Once back at my deks, the first thing I did was Google Pragmatic Agile and true enough it really was a thing!

There are many definitions of Pragmatic Agile all over the internet, there is even a Pragmatic Agile group – who knew?

Finding The Best Fit

We have such a wide variety of work within our portfolio. All for different clients doing a wide range of activities.

Some of our work is more dynamic where we receive ongoing requests – Kanban fits perfect for this. Using tools like Trello or Microsoft Planner and a good old fashioned white wall and post-it notes.

Our software development or dev ops platforms projects are often better suited to scrum, where we can effectively plan a sprint and manage the backlog at the start of the sprint and have a clear Definition of Ready and Definition of Done. We tend to use Jira or VSTS displayed on the TV screens in each delivery bay as our tool of choice – as well as complementing with the white wall.

Overall governance is covered by our Scrum of Scrums which allows us to have an overall view of what is going on in each stream of work across all of the Centre. We all meet every morning at 9.30 including myself, the Centre delivery lead, all scrum masters and the operations team. This is one of the most valuable half hours of the day. It allows for total transparency across all of the teams. We focus on blockers and try to resolve these by talking and collaborating to find the best solution. More often than not, someone has already experienced the problem before and we can share our knowledge and experience. With this approach we can make decisions on resourcing, technology, approach and often it’s a great opportunity for the scrum masters to bring things to the table that just need talking through. It’s also a good way for everyone to know what visitors we have in the Centre that day and any new work, training or events that are going on.

We have a squad of around 16 Bionix Robotics Process Automation engineers who have within their own teams around 12 projects ongoing at any one time. To handle this they have a Mega Kanban 3 times per week which is similar to the scrum of scrums, but focuses on the many different areas and clients that come to them with their specific RPA and automation problems.

Every 2 months we host an Uber Scrum where I basically cascade and share interesting and useful info to everyone. These sessions allow full openness of two way discussions across everyone in the team and gives anyone an opportunity to raise any questions, bring some ideas out on the table and feel part of something bigger than their own scrum teams or squads.

Industrialisation – sounds very serious!

One of our latest apps to cloud transformation projects is going to be large scale using 3 scrum teams in the UK over 2 locations and up to 10 teams offshore in India. We need to make this seamless and consistent and are currently looking at the best scalable agile fit with either Safe or Nexus. We have had a similar scale project previously where we took (again) a common sense approach and took elements from different methodologies that worked for us. It is going to be interesting how this works out!

I do have concerns over Safe Agile as this brings back some of the layers and processes that look to be more waterfall than our current pragmatic approach to agile, but I understand with work of a certain size we need some level of governance and oversight. Watch this space!

Manifesto

If we look back to the reason why Agile methods were first introduced, the Manifesto fir Agile deliveries (to me) is very much in keeping with a pragmatic and common sense approach…

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

Whatever approach to Agile is being used you must always review the approach regularly, for example as part of the regular delivery retrospective ceremonies or a specific approach retrospective to learn from what you have been doing and ask yourselves …

• What went well?
• What didn’t go very well?
• What can you do better?
• Any ideas for improvements?

Agile Guilding

Within the Centre our scrum masters have a self managing guild where they can share experiences, train each other, provide coaching and mentoring and most importantly give a safe place where they can collectively solve problems.

Anyone can take a problem to a guild and with the collective experience and ideas from the scrum masters they can help solve a multitude of problems including approach, agile tooling, metrics, resourcing, in fact anything that needs some attention and thought.

In summary, don’t get too bogged down by only being a scrum purist. Figure out what works based on your experience and knowledge for the different projects. Not everything fits into one box. That’s not to say you need to cherry pick or have a miss match for each piece of work, but don’t be afraid to make change and do things better. Constantly learn and improve !

If I had been given a pound for every time I’ve been asked ”what is digital?”, I probably wouldn’t be able to afford the latest iPhone, but I might be able to afford a decent case.

I’m lucky to work in a digital team, but where does that leave my non-digital colleagues? Someone made a good point recently that just because they are not the digital team doesn’t mean they are analogue! Very true. When did any of us deliver an analogue solution in our career?

So, What Exactly Is Digital?

There is much debate in the industry about what digital actually is.

For some it’s all about a new style of technology, scripting language or tooling. For others it’s about how we work and the processes and techniques. For some it’s about how business is conducted, in particular using online channels to buy and sell.

All of these and more are correct. For me, it’s all about

• the type of work we do,
• doing things differently and
• creating an environment and culture to enable everyone to be their best.

A Different Type Of Work Takes A Different Type Of Person

The technologies we use now are certainly different to a few years ago. When I started in IT, Cobol was still the language of choice and Java was just starting to make a difference. We have evolved so much in the last 20 years.

Most of our work is cloud hosted and it’s a rare occasion that on premise is the first choice. Dev Ops, Agile, automation, robotics, platforms, containers, microservices amongst other buzz words are talked about and worked on in the team.

Open source software and tooling are positively encouraged and names like Gherkin, Cucumber, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Chocolatey, Balsamic, Hadoop, Python, UX and Service Design can be overhead in discussions around the teams.

We have been so fortunate to realise early on, that things were changing and we recognised the need to evolve and re-invent our programmers into multi-skilled engineers, where tooling rather than native code is king.

Previously the type of person who would have made a good programmer might not be the ideal candidate today as an engineer. I’ve had many CVs on my desk that would have ticked every box a few years ago, but now the first thing we look at is will they fit into the team and do they have a high level of learnability.

The autocratic management style that was so familiar a few short years ago, can no longer be found in my team. I see myself as an enabler of the teams rather than managing them. As Steve Jobs said (not exactly verbatim, but you get the picture) ”We don’t hire clever people to tell them what to do, we expect them to tell us what to do”. When the team make suggestions, I take them seriously and try to make things happen for them whether that is training, having a relationship with a technology partner, getting licenses for a particular tool or giving them time to work on some innovation outside of their regular work.

The New Team Mindset

One of the first things we did as part of our cultural shift was to remove the hierarchies. We rationalised the roles within the teams. Everything is delivered using an Agile approach. We now have scrum masters and team members which includes everyone from apprentice engineers to architects.

Our people and their team have a number of attributes and characteristics…

• No hierarchy – badges are left at the door
• Everyone is equal
• Everyone mentors and coaches each other
• Transparency is a given – we don’t want secrets or hidden agendas
• We don’t fail, we learn lessons
• We share our blockers and issues and resolve them together
• We solve problems
• We have time to innovate, learn and develop
• We remember and nurture our passion for IT
• We celebrate and recognise achievements and successes
• We have fun!

Speedboats over Supertankers

Working in a mega corporation the deals that previously were common were the multi billion 15 year outsourcing deals. This does seem to be changing and rather than the huge mega deal, clients seem very interested in breaking down their big challenges into smaller discreet problems. From which we develop a minimum viable product or do some digital experimentation. Using agile techniques of constant feedback loops means we can very easily change direction where we need to. Starting small or ”not boiling the ocean” has allowed us to reinvent our reputation as an innovative, digital partner to our clients. Where we have started small with maybe 2 or 3 people, inevitably turns into 2 or 3 scrum team’s solving more and more problems.

Digital Is Binary

There are many definitions of what digital is. Everything from cutting edge technologies, online business transactions, even legacy mainframe application development using agile, dev ops and automation.

One thing that can’t be debated, every digital application whether it is written in Cobol or any of today’s tools, it is still only 1s and 0s.

Photo by rawpixel.com on Pexels.com

In this second part of the blog, I want to explore how we have created a high performing, multi skilled team where training, collaborative working, innovation and  mentoring have become real enablers for our people and for our projects.

No More Silos

It is a standard concept in Agile teams to have T shaped resources that have a deep specialism as well as more breadth to a person’s skills e.g. an engineer can also have automation and testing skills.  This allows for relatively small scrum teams to be able to deliver whatever is needed within the confines of their own team without having to find skills from other areas.  When more traditional siloed teams are used, it often results in a bun fight for people’s time and managers or accounts wrapping their arms around resources.  This is no good for project delivery or for individuals who don’t get the opportunity to develop and upskill or multi skill.

Taking our people from ‘I’ shaped to ‘T’ shaped was one of the first steps in having a higher performing team.  However, we very quickly realised we needed more from our people and could give them more in return.

A number of the team are influencers and leaders and these people need to have more stronger strings to their bows.  So, we started to develop our ‘X’ shaped people.  These are our natural leaders, both business or technical who are the influencers and agents of change in our team.  The ‘X’ shapers talk to key client decision makers, influence technical and delivery direction and are the thought leaders amongst their peers.

We recognised we were taking our people on a journey from ‘I to T to X’.

To develop the path for an individuals journey, everyone in the team was mapped as either an I, T or X as their starting points on their individual development plan.

To support the development of X shaped people, we have a range of soft skills and leadership training and coaching covering Influencing skills, being an agent of change, coaching and mentoring, communication, prioritisation and  solutioning.

Technical Training Team Triangle – AKA  The T4

The next dimension to multi skilling is also about addressing some very common problems …

• Removing single points of failure
• Attrition and retention of individuals with strong skills who were regularly being headhunted
• No clear career paths for our new to corporation roles of scrum master, product owner, coach, Dev Ops engineer and automation engineer
• Ever changing IT
• No time to innovate
• No fun and forgetting the passion for IT

Scrum Team Alignment :

We cut down and across our labour pyramid when pulling together our scrum teams.  This enables us to identify not only the next layer of top talent, but the next 4 layers.  This model facilitates mentoring and coaching across all layers of a team.  The coaching and mentoring doesn’t just head down the pyramid from the experts at the top, but heads in all directions especially where we have some of our early career people bringing new perspectives, experiences and a passion for learning and sharing new ideas or technologies.  We like to promote an environment where everybody learns something new every day.

There can be a fine balance between delivering on our project commitments and providing good development opportunities for our teams.  To make sure nothing dropped with our deliveries, we provided partial assignments for our team members.  They were still at least 50% assigned on their original project  (we provided a partial backfill to keep delivery on track), but we also gave them another assignment on a project that was using new technologies and approaches which meant when their current role was completed, they were 100% ready to move onto the next role.

Innovation

To restore the passion for technology and bring some fun back to the teams, we gave them the time and freedom to innovate.  Listening to their ideas for innovating either for our client’s benefit or our internal benefit reinvigorated the team’s passion.  They were excited to produce some amazing results and get their hands on world class tools that previously might not have been used in our work.  The results were amazing!  People were looking forward to coming into work!  We did this with very little cash investment – we provided 3 Raspberry Pi’s and some RFID tokens and a reader – the rest came from the team’s inspiration.

Mentoring

One innovation project that is currently active is to get the teams to develop a mentoring app, similar to Tinder where both mentors and mentees enter their skills profile and there is a data matching process which makes suggestions for mentors covering both technical and personal / career mentoring.

The team are learning so much from this exercise.  I am acting as the Product Owner and we have assigned a Scrum Master and Engineering Team.  So far, they have captured the requirements and produced a wire frame using Balsamic software – it looks amazing.   We are planning an innovation evening where the team can take this to the coding stage which promotes some fun social collaboration in the team – I provide the pizzas and they produce the magic!

I recently spoke to a group of early career engineers at one of our resourcing partners who were just coming to the end of their digital training programme and asked them  what was important to them in deciding to join a company.  Every single person whom I spoke with said the same thing … they were looking for a company where they had the opportunity to learn from and be mentored by more experienced staff.  Salary and job perks were surprisingly much lower down their criteria for their future employer.  This reinforced how we were enabling the collaborative mentoring culture within our scrum teams.  We might not always  be offering the highest salaries in this competitive market, but we were providing the mentoring and opportunity to apply learnings and technical training alongside some very experienced techies.

Training

For quite some time our employee engagement feedback was either there was no training or there was no time for training.  The training budgets hadn’t been distributed and we couldn’t wait, so we started to get creative…

We contacted many of our technology partners including Redhat, Amazon, Microsoft, CA Technology, Github amongst others and most of them gave us access to their free training, free software and with some free onsite expertise and detailed technology training.  Our corporation also has a deep pool of trainings available to anyone in the company and we invested some time to figure out what was good and applicable.  We also tapped into so much free training online including the power of a good YouTube video!

We also took advantage of the UK Apprentice levy and have 23 of our team on a Digital Technology Degree programme.  This acts as a great retention incentive for our people.  We are truly investing in our people with this and giving them an amazing development path.   We are now looking at the Apprentice Master Degree programmes now to try and take this even further.

For anyone new to digital either new to company or new to the team, we produced a curriculum called the “Digi-Dojo”.  This is digital enablement training which allows everyone to speak the same digital language, introduces concepts around Agile, Kanban, Cloud Computing, Automation amongst other hot topics and gives anyone a great foundation before looking at their more detailed career paths and training plans.

The Enviable Workplace Culture

There are many factors in creating an effective digital culture.  If you get this right you can deliver some incredible projects, have a highly engaged team where people love coming to work and are developing at the same time.

My aim is creating an enviable workplace where anyone who sees what we do, wants to work here.

It is incredible to see this happen – when you see people come alive and energetic to doing things differently.   I recently gave a tour of our centre to a number of engineers from a different part of the business – they were literally based in the building next door and had never been in our space.  By the end of the tour, their energy and enthusiasm was obvious to see.  As soon as they got back to their desks, I started receiving emails from them asking when they could move their things over and get a desk with us.  They commented on how they understood the theory of digital and agile before they visited us, but now it was made real to them and they were now completely on board with the changes that were needed in their part of the business.

In the next part of the Essence of Digital blog, I’ll cover collaboration and digital leadership.