For those that missed it yesterday in Sydney, there was an Agile "Projects & Change Agile Breakfast" held by Morgan McKinley where some of the agile industry leaders in Sydney were represented on a panel discussion. There was quite a large turnout of 300 or more people which is a good gauge of the Agile momentum in Australia.
JP Morgan - Tim Heylar, Head of Product Development
Vodafone - Garry Lababa, Technology Manager
Commonwealth Bank - Pete Steel, Exec GM Retail & Wealth
PwC - Catia Davim - Director People & Change
I was lucky enough to sit at the front and got microphone time to ask the panelist the following question:
JP Morgan - Tim Heylar, Head of Product Development
Vodafone - Garry Lababa, Technology Manager
Commonwealth Bank - Pete Steel, Exec GM Retail & Wealth
PwC - Catia Davim - Director People & Change
I was lucky enough to sit at the front and got microphone time to ask the panelist the following question:
You've all discussed about setting up project based teams within your organisations, I'm interested whether any of you have taken the leap to install long-lived Product based teams to reduce the inherent waste in ramping up and disbanding teams?
JP Morgan and Vodafone had the opportunity to answer.
JP Morgan:
We did indeed find in our employee surveys that we had team members that were dissatisfied with being split up and sent to other teams after working in a high performing agile team. It also doesn't make sense when a team member has skill and domain knowledge in one area and then we go and dropped into another area that they know little about.
Vodafone:
We have a very mature DevOps strategy in place and with this our teams are long lived and supporting the system they have built. In this way we are continually feeding new features and enhancement in response to business and customer demands.
I felt Vodafone had the better answer as it was clear they had actually adopted Product Based teams by implementing a DevOps strategy. JP Morgan seemed to acknowledge that having project based teams was an issue but it seemed from the answer they had not really implemented anything substance and I suspect that they were 'resource pooling' their employees.
The buzz line by most of the panellists was to say in one way or another something about going to Silicon Valley and being convince by witnessing Lean Startup companies in action. However, to be really mimic a Lean Startup behaviour, I believe there needs to be a radical change some of the funding models from being Project to Product based. By keeping the best skilled team members aligned to a Product where new features and enhancements are made as the Product evolves is the best strategy for:
Other quotes below I found were interesting sound bites. You can see these quotes and more by following me on Twitter: @agilefact
JP Morgan:
We did indeed find in our employee surveys that we had team members that were dissatisfied with being split up and sent to other teams after working in a high performing agile team. It also doesn't make sense when a team member has skill and domain knowledge in one area and then we go and dropped into another area that they know little about.
Vodafone:
We have a very mature DevOps strategy in place and with this our teams are long lived and supporting the system they have built. In this way we are continually feeding new features and enhancement in response to business and customer demands.
I felt Vodafone had the better answer as it was clear they had actually adopted Product Based teams by implementing a DevOps strategy. JP Morgan seemed to acknowledge that having project based teams was an issue but it seemed from the answer they had not really implemented anything substance and I suspect that they were 'resource pooling' their employees.
The buzz line by most of the panellists was to say in one way or another something about going to Silicon Valley and being convince by witnessing Lean Startup companies in action. However, to be really mimic a Lean Startup behaviour, I believe there needs to be a radical change some of the funding models from being Project to Product based. By keeping the best skilled team members aligned to a Product where new features and enhancements are made as the Product evolves is the best strategy for:
- Innovation, by giving team members ownership of their work, which in turn motivates and gives them incentive to do their best.
- Removing the inherent waste in ramping up and disbanding project teams.
Other quotes below I found were interesting sound bites. You can see these quotes and more by following me on Twitter: @agilefact
To facilitate organisational transformation getting execs from successful agile firms to meet your seniors in 'Golf cart diplomacy' helps address any fears in making the change
In order to win over Risk/Audit, get them involved/embedded in the agile team and product a 'Risk Burndown' chart to demonstrated progress on addressing issues.
I'm a fan of abolishing PSG's (Program Steering Groups) to oversee agile teams.
To incentivise a team and get enterprise buy-in, nothing beats a customer waking the floor and observing a high performing agile team at work.
There is real value over holding a weekend Hackathon over doing a 6 month business case for a 2-3 year project
