The Secret sauce for effective work from home !

via The Secret sauce for effective work from home !

The Secret sauce for effective work from home !

” You can’t do big things if you are distracted by small things “ – Anonymous!

As the tiny invisible organism Corona disrupting the world, I am sure most of us who are blessed with opportunity to work from home are struggling to manage work and home.

Wonder how do we manage these strange times of work from (& for) home situation ?

Well, To be really effective at work from home, what is the most important enabler ?

Is it Technology? Is it Network? Is it the costly electronic devices? That neat private desk space ?  which makes you get going at best?

Answer is NONE of the above. The most important secret sauce is “Schedule”!

Without a schedule, everything that you think will enable better work from home will fail and fall to dust.

When you have a daily schedule and stick to it, for few days, it does something very amazing!

• When you have a routine, wake up on time, get your morning body routines, breakfast done by time and start your work day at 9 am , in few days, your entire family , right from elders, spouse and kids knows your plan and support you.
• With sticking to routine, it’s easy to set the rules of the same personally and professionally, everyone knows when you are available and when not, so you get your work life balance
• It is easy to get your work diluted when you don’t have predefined schedule. An simple habit of writing a to-do in morning as first action on what to achieve on that day and ensuring the list is completed by end of day provides great satisfaction and an positive ego booster during these troubled days.
• With a Schedule, your brain, heart and also stomach ( 🙂 ) knows what to expect when , that binge eater in you also stays away to keep your healthy as bonus !

Suggest you give it a try to make a simple schedule and stick to it for few days, it will be a great game changer and positive one both personally and professionally.

You may use an simple pen and paper /Postit  or free tools like Todoist or Microsoft ToDo 

Let us get scheduled and be happy!!

Business Agility with KANBAN

Delivered an session on driving business agility with KANBAN in Lean KANBAN India conference 2019.

Leveraging Flow Boards for bringing Accountability and Urgency to get work done !

One key tenants of Agile project management is to have an self sustained team where every member in team have an shared accountability of the common goal and works with sense of Urgency on same.

However, its easier said than done. Bringing the shared accountability and sense of urgency requires a big shift in behavior and culture of the team members.

Having an effective physical flow board makes a great impact to address this :

Scrum guide states “Significant aspects of the process must be visible to those responsible for the outcome. Transparency requires those aspects be defined by common standard so observers share a common understanding of what is being seen”

Having an Physical flow Board helps :

• Bringing an sense of ownership with work of each member visible with status . when we have an daily stand up in front of the board, the member implicitly starts owning and acting on the task at hand with urgency
• Brings an order to work progress and status becomes transparent and not hidden in some excel or tool
• Team is in better position to take decisions for collective good , help the members who are not able to make progress and also challenge each other, improve collaboration
• Help make team efficient with focus to get the work fully complete and reducing work in progress
• Togetherness and Team Pride : Having the Physical board also have an very positive impact in bringing team together and celebrate success as team sees the progress in front of their eyes.

Few Tips to get this right :

• Ensure every work item has a clear owner , status and expected completion date
• Daily Stand up at the start of the day with mandatory attendance where each member updates progress , ask for help for any impediments and confirms he/she is on track to complete the work
• Celebrate success even if its trivial.
• Transparent and Open culture – The role of facilitator to ask probing questions to ensure team members are fear free to share updates and gets support when needed can make a big difference

Have you tried this in your teams? please share your insights on challenges and benefits in implementing an flow board within your teams.

Secrets of Going Gung Ho !!

Happen to read this excellent book written by Ken Blanchard and would advise anyone who is interested in building best team to read it.

The three essential secrets shared by author for going Gung Ho are wonderful wisdom for any individual, coach\mentor or organization that wants to go Gung Ho!

Secret 1: The Spirit of the Squirrel – Worthwhile Work

Like the squirrels keep saving the seeds for the winter so that the community can survive, any work a person does should be worthwhile for him to be motivated to do it.

Even a trivial work like washing dishes in a restaurant is worthwhile if the person understands the fact that – by cleaning the dish properly, he is helping the hungry customers to eat food in hygiene environment and stay healthy.

• Knowing that the work he \she does makes the world better place is the best motivation for any individual
• Every one works toward a shared goal, with trust and focus – this builds self-esteem and discipline
• It is Values that guide all plans, decisions and actions (Remember that many of us see the challenge to inculcate agile values within the practices and processes)

Secret 2: The way of the Beaver – In control of achieving the goal

Every person is his own leader, when every person in the team understands his clear responsibility and ownership and is adequately challenged, the team is highly productive. They know what they are doing and will figure out how to do it best

• A level playing field with clearly marked territory – As each beaver is its own leader, it takes its position in repairing their dam, it does not dictate others what to do and aligns together with freedom
• Thoughts, needs and dreams are respected, listened and acted upon – the decision of every beaver is respected by other, everyone know where the best tree is, no one withholds information
• Able but challenged – it requires some stretch and unchartered situations to keep everyone happy. The challenge brings the focus and energy to get it done

Secret 3: The Gift of the Goose – Cheering others on

When every person in the team openly recognizes the individual’s and team’s success spontaneously with individual attention specific for the outcome he\she produced, the individual and team get their best motivation and also give it back to others. In this process entire team goes gung ho with best working culture.

• True Recognition and appreciation. Timely, responsive, unconditional and enthusiastic recognition and appreciations make the workplace gung ho.
• No Score, No Game and cheer the progress. It is very essential we have a way to measure and score the progress for success. Scoring and cheering makes the team excited and productive
• e= mc^2, Enthusiasm equals mission times cash and congratulations. Having worthwhile work, cheering each other and fulfilled material needs creates the right enthusiasm for every person

In summary, when every person recognizes and understands the value of work he does, is in control of his work, adequately challenged and gets the right timely recognition, then the individual and his team goes Gung Ho becoming the best individual, team and Organization in the world !!.

Let us spread the secrets of going Gung Ho!!

Vision – The binding glue

One of the common reason for agile teams to fail is lack of clarity and commitment on Vision.

 Teams often focus on getting work done in a high frequency and forgets the whole purpose of what they are targeting to achieve in big picture.Unless the last man in the army believes on what he\she is fighting far, the war cannot be won !

Having a great, credible Product Vision can be a game changer and is a success factor for agile delivery. A vision should be simple, understandable, realistic,challenging , engaging and short.

It gives a sense of direction and purpose for the agile team and glues them together with a common goal

Ken Schwaber – the founding member of Scrum rightly points that “The minimum plan necessary to start a Scrum project consists of a vision and a Product Backlog”

The Product Owner has a great responsibility to ensure he\she radiates and articulates the Vision (the very purpose of assembling the self-sustaining team) to every team member and stakeholders.

It becomes even more critical when you work in a distributed agile setup. If the developers sitting miles away does not understand the very reason on why they are writing the code and what is the business goal they are striving , it is very difficult to align with the stakeholders and be committed.

Few possible way to get this addressed is

• Get maximum stakeholders involved in creating the Vision statement and make them feel as co -owners of the Vision, Gamify !
• Product Owner – takes extra effort to ensure the Vision is clearly documented, articulated to the team , may be using Visual information radiators like Banners \Posters in work place
• The Product Owner is able to tie and relate the Epics and Feature to the Vision and help team connect the dots
• Every major progress in achieving the vision is celebrated and an atmosphere is built that helps the team live and sleep with the Vision.

One of the secret ingredient in differentiating great teams from “work as usual” teams is getting the team live and own the Vision !!

Let us build great Vision and inspire the great teams !!

Impediment handling: A success factor

An impediment is anything that slows or block the agile team to get their work done. In traditional term it can be an issue or even a risk that need attention.

For example – It can be unavailability of a meeting room , unclear requirement to external dependencies that’s beyond team’s control or simply technical debt

There are few anti-patterns /traps that agile teams fall into in impediment handling

• Team member identifies the impediment, but he/she is afraid to share with a false perception that his capability may be questioned if he says it is an impediment and seek support , here the team member silently struggles to solve the impediment by himself, which may become counter-productive and impact the entire team if not addressed
• Sometimes, the team becomes too ownership averse, here the scrum team just identifies impediment in every story of their scope and puts the onus of solving it to management\external parties
• Another anti pattern is the team gets sucked into one impediment  and spend all their effort in this dark hole that may not be relevant at all in larger context, Owning every impediment so religiously as a team without seeking the right expertise. This is like starting to chisel a mountain with barren hands ..
• Getting used to the impediment and staying with status quo – like if a java deployment takes six hours every day due to poor database or hardware , you start accounting that six hours waste in your planning instead of escalating and fixing the database\hardware issue – Technical debt
• Being so considerate and submissive to all parties  . Like picking up requirements that is not fully refined, just to make the Product owner happy . This leading to higher frustration to the team as well as Product owner at the end.

Few ways to avoid above traps and handle the impediments in right way is

• Every team member is motivated and equipped to raise his voice assertively and look out on impediments earliest possible
• Use right agile governance tool like JIRA\Rally that can facilitate and radiate the status of impediments and keep it transparent to all stakeholders
• Proper ceremonies including Daily stand up\ Scrum of Scrum that facilitates impediment handling in time bound manner
• Clear impediment handling process and escalation mechanism visible to team . Example Team member> Scrum Master > RTE\Coach> Leadership
• Fear free and open retrospectives that challenge the status quo and help solve invisible impediments like technical debts and a reward system that supports it
• Enabling a knowledge sharing \seeking culture where team can continuously identify  waste [ impediment] and find out of box ways to solve them.
• Focus on technical debt reduction and accounting this in the budget \ release planning

Let us hunt down the impediments at right moment with right tools !!

Priorities \Goal setting for Scrum Master

As companies transforming themselves to agile, it is essential to transform the HR processes, how we measure individuals and also set priorities\goals to them.

Following list of priorities can help the Scrum Masters in setting their priorities\goals

• I will build a fun filled atmosphere in the team where every person enjoys work with optimum collaboration and trust

 

• I will ensure all stakeholders of the scrum including Product owner have a common shared vision which is documented and imbibed with every person in the team

 

• I will ensure the way of working, cadence, ceremonies are all clearly documented, adapted and continuously improved by team

 

• I will strive for 100% visibility of all user stories, both from the product backlog and the sprint backlog, during each sprint.

 

• I will ensure that zero new work enters the sprint backlog from outside the team during a sprint.

 

• Ensure adherence to scum practices by mentoring the team regularly, will measure this by conducting agile maturity assessment

 

• I will ensure the impediments are proactively identified by team and raised as early as possible, minimizing no new surprises within the sprint

 

• I will ensure sprint retrospectives happen objectively and the outcome is tracked as visible actions , followed up and closed within agreed timeframe

 

• I will help improve the team productivity by motivating them to take stretch goals and also focus in removing any bottlenecks and idle time in way of working , will measure by improvement in velocity/ reduction in cycle time over the period of time

 

• I will constantly challenge the team and facilitate how to reduce the technical debt by bringing in automation, refactoring and other agile\devops practices

 

• I will motivate the team members to learn at least one additional skill in next six months and does help bring efficiency and reduce dependency within the team

 

• I will constantly challenge and observe team for any possible improvements, encourage team members to come up with continuous improvement ideas and support them realize the same, will measure by % of savings achieved, effort saved or business value realized by these improvements

The Scrum masters may choose some or all of these as their priorities and can sharpen their scrum master skills by realizing the same.

I am sure , this list is not complete, feel free to add any missing top priorities that you feel is important

Agility – a matter of necessity !!

As Computers and Software era started, businesses and IT industry built quite some focus in building capacity , processes and individuals with focus on specializations .

• Businesses come up with large multi-year, multi-billion  IT programs ,big bang implementations and tender it as fixed price projects , securing it with detailed contracts
• Project Manager who loves dictating teams what to do and live on metrics sitting in corner offices and thrive with high pressure environments
• Business Analysts who can create charming presentations and tons of documentations
• Developer who is excellent geek in writing code and live with their PCs to meet the detailed design specifications
• Tester who can break and discover bugs in any possible system focused on design specs and SLAs\RCAs

This was perfect recipe for success in that world where requirements were clear, everyone know what to do , all preplanned and work to the accuracy. Business were monopolies and had luxury to plan upfront with no \minimal competition with strong entry barriers.

This was fantastic for the 20th Century needs.

But, world is changing and changed for good , Business and IT world is transformed and transforming very fast

• Business no longer can envision what they need with IT even for next 6 months, competition is thriving and business strategies need to change every single day
• As there are no upfront well documented requirements, the Business Analysts, Developers and Testers need to work closely with business on daily basis to see what is required to be built, tested and align closely
• This forces teams to break the age old success recipes of specialization and compartmentalization in the name of CoEs [ Testing Center of Excellence for Example]
• This dynamism expects the members to know a bit of other’s skill to align and support each other so that the team succeeds.
• The ownership moves to the team that sits closely with business [Product Owner] and Project manager is moved to more of a support role
• As Money is scarce and competition is heavy, business are forced to focus on prioritizing the most important items which brings business value instead of fully featured fancy systems – emergence of MVP
• As cost and business value are prime drivers, teams focus on getting rid of trivial tasks and focus on automation and continuous improvement
• IT processing is moving more towards cloud, virtualization and mobile, reducing the complexity for developers

• The focus is more on Individuals, interaction and collaboration over Process and tools

• Working software focused on MVP over tons of documentations

• Collaboration and dynamic prioritization over rigid contracts

• Responding to change and aligning with dynamic business needs over following the five year plans …

And hence as a matter of necessity, the next era focused on Agility started…

Lets embrace the new age challenges and be Agile !!

Hello I’am Agile !

Agile”  is the hot topic these days . Every Cxo, every program want to say “Hello – I am agile ” !!

However one trap of this top down focus is – we might end up picking some methods and call ourselves agile without really being agile, or stretch every IT team so thin to reach a situation where in “Operation succeeds- but the patient is dead”.As the “Agile Fluency Model” rightly says , it is your business need that should drive the level of agility you need to focus at.

One week scrum may be the best fit for a digital website , but it may be irrelevant for a complex package implementation.

Going live every 5 seconds is brilliant for a ecommerce company , however may be a nonsense approach for a call center implementation

So before we take the steps of going agile, we need to consider

What is the business need/Problem that we like to achieve/solve

• What is the level of agility that is to be targeted for
• Which agile method is best suited for the team and stakeholders to start with [ and can be evolved as we progress]
• Treat Agile transformation as an active initiative with focus on building the enablers across organization specific to People, Process, Tools and Governance.

Also  the most important – being agile is more of a People cultural shift which isover and above the tools, metrics, cadence, story points etc.

Focus on agile that is driven by strong business Value built on strong People\Cultural shift  has the best shot of success …

Let us “Be Agile”