Agile in the City: Birmingham – All about high-performing teams

This post was written by Jovile Bartkeviciute.

Day 2

Keynote by Jenni Jepsen – “Empowering people is impossible”

Jenni Jepsen delivered an inspiring talk on what actually means to be empowered and why empowered people are essential to your organisation. Key takeaways:

• Empowerment – if I have rely on somebody to empower me then how empowered am I?
• It is all about giving control and pushing decisions to people who have information – we need people who feel empowered and would take the control.
• Empowered people:
  • they have autonomy and influence,
  • they feel connected to each other, team and organisation,
  • they have purpose
  • their work is fair
• This is what intrinsically motivates us – we feel engaged, more willing to take control.
• Some people just want to be told what to do, why?
  • There are no people who are born wanting to be told what to do – it happens over time. 
• “Can I give you some feedback?” phrase calls out the same emotions as seeing a bear in the woods.
  • You should ask for feedback yourself to stay in control.
• We can design interactions to control what we want people to feel.
• What gets in the way of giving control? Common obstacles Agile leaders face on the journey:
  • Busy-ness
  • Contradictory messages in the environment – we do not need the signs, we need trust
  • Too many procedures to follow
  • Stress
    • Neuroplasticity: over time connections in the brain change – it is a survival mechanism and if we are stressed a lot, we start seeing the errors and are quick to go negative instead of seeing positive things.
  • Old habits
    • We are wired to stay in the habit mode – doing what we know takes less energy for the brain.
    • You need to create new habits
• We cannot empower people, but we can change the environment so that they would feel empowered.

 

Scott Fulton – “Agile life lessons – looking beyond the processes”

Scott Fulton walked us through the nine lessons he learnt by adopting agile in the police.

9 Agile Life Lessons:

1. Agile can teach you the difference between leadership and (micro)management
2. It can change how you judge success
   • Software is not a project – projects by the definition has a start and end
3. If you feel overwhelmed you just don’t know what to prioritise next
4. Your stakeholders will get confused
   • You might need to stop using word “agile”
5. “You can’t make a tailored suit if the customer never comes in for measurements”
6. Technology is for people, not done to people
   • technology is the enabler – people do not want to use the technology, they want the end goal
7. Listen to the team – they are usually right
8. Being a Product Owner is bloody hard
9. Change is hard great!

 

Spencer Turner – “How many hats can you really wear?”

Spencer Turner introduced the audience to the problems cross-functional teams solve and cause to the organisation. Some takeaways:

• Business problems:
  • Nearly 75% of Cross-functional teams are dysfunctional
    • They fail on at least three of five criteria:
      • Meeting a planed budget
      • Staying on schedule
      • Adhering to specifications
      • Meeting a customer expectations
      • Maintaining alignment with corporate goals.
• Human problems:
  • Pressure / Stress / Anger
  • Overload / Inability to cope
  • Feelings of failure
  • Feeling you can’t say you’re struggling
  • Feeling you’re an imposter
• In a cross-functional team people are expected to have more than one skill.
• Some responsibilities don’t mix, don’t try and force them.

 

John Clapham – “Team Design for Continuous Delivery”

John Clapham talked about high performing teams and the importance of social engagement. Key points:

• Co-dependence and co-evolution of a team are essential for continuous delivery.
• Use continuous delivery to reduce the risk of releases, decrease cycle time, and make it economic to work in small batches.
• Relationships are hard:
  • Regarding groups of people – 3 people – 3 individual relationships, 5 people – 10 relationships, 8 people – 28 relationships. The more people, the more relationships there need to be – the number grows exponentially.
• Why should we care about social engagement?
  • Engagement drives profit – by the State of DevOps Report 2016, companies with high employee engagement grew revenues 2.5 times faster
  • Also, it leads to lower absenteeism (37%), fewer safety incidents (41%) and fewer quality defects (41%).
• What matters if you wish to have a high performing team:
  • Dependability
  • Structure & clarity
  • Meaning of work
  • Impact of work
  • Psychological safety
• Successful Continuous Delivery team traits:
  • A strong desire to learn and co-evolve.
  • An understanding of business imperative, and the autonomy to act on it.
  • Safety – to take risk, succeed and fail.
  • Ability to manage a high level of interactions.
  • Self measurement of achievement.
• It is better to do 100 things at 1% than one thing at 100%.

 

Jim Gumbley – “Information security in agile development”

Jim Gumbley talked about information security needs for agile teams. key points:

• The problem of security requirements in agile teams:
  • Teams often would not know what are the security requirements
  • There is no thought into the bigger picture
  • In terms of agile security – there is no books about it.
• The best way to deal with information security is to bring in a security expert to the delivery team, however, there are not enough experts for every team.
• The most common type of security attack is still is SQL injection, which has been around for many years.
• You do not need to reinvent the wheel – try these first:
  • OWASP Top 10
  • Building attack trees
  • Application security verification standard – OWASP
  • Risk mapping workshop
  • Microsoft escalation of Privilege Cards OWASP Cornucopia

 

Matthew Skelton – “How and why to design your teams for modern software systems”

And the last speaker of the day, our co-founder and principal consultant Matthew Skelton, concluded the conference talking about Conway’s law, cognitive load and introduced us to different types of team topologies. Key points:

• Conway’s Law
  • organisations are producing designs which are copies of the communication structures
  • Homomorphic force in action:
    • Reverse Conway’s law – you can change your organisation’s structure to match the structure of the system’s that you want.
• Cognitive Load
  • Cognitive load – the total amount of mental effort being used in the working memory
  • Stress impacts team performance by narrowing or weakening the team level perspective, if they have too much to consider, they’ll cease to perform as a team.
  • A well-performed team performs better than a group of well-performing individuals.
  • Match the team responsibility to the cognitive load that the team can handle.
• Real-world Team Topologies
  • devopstopologies.com
  • There is no single ‘right’ team topology, but several ‘bad’ topologies for any one organisation.
• Guidelines for Team Design
  • Evolve different team topologies for different parts of the organisation at different times to match the team purpose and context.

Slides:

 

Overall, the talks were informative, interactive and entertaining, common themes were autonomy and the importance of psychological safety, cognitive load and healthy working environment for a high-performing team.

 

 

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