Luke Hohmann, two techies, one great conversation.
The CEO and Founder of Conteneo, Luke Hohmann is a recognized expert on Agile. He is also the author of four books and numerous articles on software product management.
During the San Diego Global Scrum Gathering 2017, Luke is going to be sharing his vast knowledge this next Monday April 10th, with a workshop about Enterprise Agile Retrospectives. So we asked him for a brief interview about his upcoming workshop and wrote a post about it!
Luke’s work on using serious games to engage citizens has been covered in Businessweek (https://twitter.com/BW) and The Financial Times (https://twitter.com/FinancialTimes).
Needless to say, Luke was very easy to reach and always happy to talk to someone about #Agile, you can tell this guy loves sharing his knowledge! Thanks a lot Luke!
Q: First of all, tell us a bit about yourself and your journey with #Agile software development and #retrospectives.
I started when I was in Aurigin systems, the first data warehouse for patent portfolios. During that job, in 1997, I took a Problem Solving leadership course where Norm Kerth was my instructor. Norm’s renowned for his groundbreaking work in retrospectives and you can see some of the influence of his teachings in Innovation Games® such as Speedboat that are used as Agile retrospectives
After that I joined the organizing committee of the first Agile Conference in 2003 in Salt Lake City. Working alongside Alistair Cockburn (https://twitter.com/TotherAlistair), Ken Schwaber (https://twitter.com/kschwaber) and others, we produced a remarkable event.
Following that I was asked and was very happy to serve on the board of Agile Alliance and provided consulting services for the Scrum Alliance.
Along the way I created a number of frameworks originally used for market research. Many of these, such as Speedboat and Remember the Future, have been recast as techniques for retrospectives.
In-person frameworks are great for smaller teams and smaller retrospectives, but they don’t scale to the needs of enterprises. This is a real problem, because organizations that don’t scale retrospectives are missing out on substantial benefits of Agile. Put another way, single teams make “local improvements” or “local optimizations”. What enterprises require are macro improvements — improvements that affect as many teams as possible.
So, I decided to fix that. My background has always been in enterprise software, so I joined with some close friends to create the Conteneo Weave platform. And along the way we’ve even hired Nearsoft to help us build out parts of our platform!
So that brings us to my topic for the conference. Enterprise level retrospectives, or how to make retrospectives useful at an organization scale, for organizations of more than 6 teams. I’ll talk about our experiences in producing retrospectives for 17, 25, 42 and even larger sets of teams.
Q: What can we expect from your workshop? What are we going to learn?
Attendees can expect a few things for sure:
Attendees will be able to determine if an enterprise retrospective is fit for their organization: Not every organization needs/can do an enterprise level retrospective.
I will also provide a very detailed blueprint on how to do an enterprise level organization: How to manage the process, the teams, and making sure both the team and the enterprise itself gains value from the data.
Q: How do you post-process and analyze data?
Enterprise retrospectives differ from single or small team retrospectives because of the data we’re generating. In a single team retrospective, you get all of the data you need at once. In an enterprise retrospective, you might need a few days to gather data and then a few more to analyze it. So you need to frame the timing and manage expectations.
For example, when analyzing the data from the the client I referenced early who did a 42 team retrospective, we found that every team had roughly the same complaint about automated testing. The pattern was extremely consistent, so we investigated this further. We found that this was actually configuration problem of key components. Once we figured it out, the problem was fixed and the velocity of the entire organization improved.
These are the kind of problems that you can only find during an enterprise retrospective, because a minor issue for one team might get swept under the rug, while a “minor issue” for every team is likely to be a very big issue.
Q: What kinds of changes create value?
There are all sorts of ways teams can derive value from retrospectives. Some are simple process changes, like changing the timing of the daily standup to better meet the needs of the group.
Sometimes it is about technological change, like changing the tool they are using, or upgrading that tool. If you are doing tech changes you need to input it as a backlog item to give the devs the credit for the work they are doing. That’s how you can make the value of the retrospective more visible.
In an enterprise retrospective this is even more important if you want to have that change effective across your organization and have the work visible to everyone.
Q: How frequently do you run an enterprise retrospective?
While you want to run a team-retrospective every sprint, this is not necessarily the case for enterprise retros, because the cadence of addressing enterprise impediments is not the same as the cadence of addressing team impediments.
I sometimes ask people to think of retrospectives as a dental care process. Brushing & flossing is the team-level maintenance that we do every Sprint. An enterprise retrospective is more like a general checkup and teeth cleaning that you do every quarter (or so). (LOL).
Q: What’s your advice for large companies that are making their transition to #Agile methodologies?
I’ve managed a number of agile transitions and I’ve found that it is absolutely essential that organizations transitioning to agile get clear on their goals. Sometimes they want to improve quality; sometimes they want to increase innovation, sometimes they want to reduce cycle time; and sometimes they want to improve employee morale. These are all good reasons, and Agile can help in any one of them (and often all of them). But one should be the primary driver of the transformation. So it’s good to have your goals clear from the beginning.
Q: Do you see #Agile as a widespread trend, or what industries do you find this is going to bring value to?
Ever since our first conference, Agile has grown in maturity beyond our wildest expectations. We now see agile being used in multiple industries and in organizations large and small. Agile has “crossed the chasm” — and I give the credit to Scott Ambler (https://twitter.com/scottwambler & http://scottambler.com/) as being the first leader who actually said this. Scott asserted that Agile is now the “normal” way of working, and to a large extent, I think he’s correct.
That doesn’t mean we’re done. We still have a lot of work to do in helping companies understand their priorities, develop strategies that are congruent with these priorities, allocate resources and align the entire organization in delivering this work. Fortunately, Conteneo’s Weave platform supports a large number of frameworks tuned to each of these critical aspects of enhanced agile practices.
It was a pleasant conversation with Luke, we found we have much in common, and can’t wait to hear what he has to say and teach about Enterprise Agile Retrospectives during his workshop at San Diego’s Global Scrum Gathering 2017. We’ll be sponsoring the event and can’t wait to see you guys there!
Going to GSG2017? Look for us and stop by to say hi!
P.S. Looking to get started with #Agile Retrospectives? Try our Agile Retrospective tool for Confluence!
