ADVENTURES OF A DELIVERY MANAGER: Week 4
Firstly… hello to +Felix Tomlinson’s girlfriend (whom I understand has been following my posts of late in a working in the open/ fifth dimension/six degrees of separation/I’m not quite sure how this is happening kind of way).
Secondly…
This week:
- Choose Your Own Adventure Training
- Turning Outwards
- Play Your Cards Right
“The one thing I’ve noticed about you Ian, is that you’re subtle”…(Said Paul briefly after the ‘gladiator pit’ I subjected him to last week).
To be fair, subtlety is definitely a dark art that I have yet to master, but given the choice between subtlety and getting things done, I definitely fall in to the latter.
Whilst in the realms on non-subtle behaviour, this week, I did my first show and tell to the HackIT Delivery team about my first project… me!
I think it’s fair to offer a mild piece of context here, otherwise we’re definitely stepping in to the realms of some serious self-gratification (boarding on narcissism).
How this came about was in my job interview where I suggested (pitched) to Hackney that I recognised that was a good chance that I had less experience than perhaps other candidates and certainly I wasn’t from a tech background. But in order to tackle this, I would in fact make myself my very first Agile project and follow the Hackney Agile Life Cycle.
So last week was the end of my first ‘sprint’ — which was firmly in the discovery stage.
I took a lightly humoured angle and named a +Cate McLaurin as the Project Sponsor, +Nicholas Teeman as the Product Owner and named some others as team members and subject matter experts and shared my main areas of learning and discovery.
These were:
* GDS Service Standards
* Hackney Agile Life Cycle
* HackIT Manifesto
* How my colleagues think and operate
* How HackIT functions as a team/service/movement
* Great ways to structure meetings & workshops
* Milk Rota
Matt Cain raised how important it is in Agile that we actually deliver value rather than just “Agile Theatre”, where we can dress up and make things look like agile with standups, sprints and show and tells. But, if there isn’t value being delivered and there isn’t a feedback loop in operation, it’s left wanting.
So outcomes from my first sprint are:
* I am now established enough in the team that I have helped my colleagues to deliver workshops thereby expanding capacity.
* I have taken the lead on Digital Support Services, an epic plus suite of works, giving capacity to David to move forward on other things and bringing some momentum in to this important area of work for the business.
* I have run a workshop to untangle multiple and difficult conversations (which is a repeatable process).
* I’ve used the times where I have a bit of spare capacity to help with some more remedial tasks (such as filming or creating displays) to unlock parts of other peoples projects.
If could summarise these — I’d do so by saying:
- I’ve become a useful member of the team that has helped to expand the capacity of HackIT delivery.
GOING FORWARD — CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE
I asked the participants of the show and tell to play a game of ‘choose your own adventure’ — rather like the books from the 80’s where one wrong decision would have the hero eaten by a dragon in an rather unfortunate manner… (did anyone EVER get to a half reasonable ending in one of these books?)
In this game, I presented various training, exposure and activity scenarios to everyone who was willing to join in, and as a collective, a vote was taken on various subjects.
As a result, the “Scenarios” I will be tackling over the next four weeks are:
1) Book a coffee/lunch/chat with 10 colleagues in HackIT that I don’t know yet.
2) Learn how to be a service assessor to understand governance better.
3) Spend 1 hour with each key team learning the basics around terminology & tech language and capture.
4) Invite my colleagues in to my workshops for feedback.
I also asked the team to encourage, challenge and dare me to do something…
ENCOURAGE: Write a blog on ‘adventures of a delivery manager’ and publish it
CHALLENGE: Work out how to make this a re-useable process for colleagues
DARE: Get a bigger audience and film the next show and tell
These will now form the main thrusts of the next sprint, as well as the organic twists and turns that a true discovery would bring.
Interestingly however, one of the main talking points turned out to be about my light anecdote at the beginning and the ‘depth’ of it (as in my project team).
Some really important questions came out. Amongst them:
- Am I the product or the delivery manager?
- What’s the definition of done?
- What are the user stories?
So Cate and Nic undertook to take the idea of the metaphor and actually turn it in to a real thing — we’re meeting next week to answer these questions.
TURNING OUTWARDS
Another spin off topic resulted in a delightful coffee with Matt in the Empire Coffee Bar. This was how do we turn this idea outwards? How do we use this forum and adventure and turn it in to something that could be used to help create a rippled effect rather than just be an interesting read.
+Matthew Cain opened up some new thinking for me, which was that the adventures of a delivery manager could go in many possible directions, but there were two possibilities that perhaps stood out more than others.
The first was that as my adventure progresses, my former colleagues in the teams and services elsewhere in the Council could be in danger of being unintentionally, but gently alienated as I become more competent in this role.
This would be especially amplified if I were to take the angle that I needed to learn all of the lingo and tech language to be a success, or I presented a narrative that suggested that ICT was the only place for Sprints & Retro’s etc…
The second, was that I might want to think on how I could use this adventure and my communication of it, to help champion the agile way of being to those people that I might be in danger of alienating.
How can I communicate our practices to a wider audience?
How might I ‘translate’ techniques that are prominent in ICT and HackIT to services that less commonly utilise Agile approaches?
How could I find a way to bring real value through this communication rather than it just be an interesting read?
They are all great questions that I will explore as part of my next ‘sprint’ over the next four weeks.
I also accept that the answers don’t need to come just from me and so I am inviting +Sue Evanson +Martyn Warnes +Denise Dje-Komenan +Jorone Brown +Fahima Khanom Hussain +Naveed Majid +Naciye Ozbilenler +Kyle Wilson+Leonie Billings — my former Team Mates to have a look at this and to help me to answer that question. I’ll also seek to expand the participation over the coming weeks also.
I’m curious to see how inclusive my current writing feels and if they’ll pick this up just from this post!
PLAY YOUR CARDS RIGHT
I mentioned in my Show & Tell that I love to mix work and play.
This week I organised a workshop using some play to untangle a web of complicated conversations.
We had a game of ‘Play Your Cards Right’ (some people might know it better as the ‘higher or lower’ game).
In this game — our first job was to create order of the rounds.
We did this by collecting all of questions and discussion points that had been raised or explored over the previous couple week and grouping them in to common topics (whilst resisting the delicious temptation to talk about them there and then). We were left with four rounds and we then played the game…
THE PEOPLE ON THE TEAM was the first round/topic that was randomly picked from the pile.
Next to come out was WHICH PROTOTYPE to choose. The workshop attendees (contestants), then had to declare whether they thought that this new card was ‘higher’ (as in that it needed to be discussed sooner) or lower (discussed later) than the subject of people on the team.
We completed this for all of the ’round’ cards (aka subjects to talk about), and then proceeded to play each round — which was a more detailed version of the rounds game. Here we had individual questions and statements that needed to be explored, so again we would decide whether the likes of VALUE & SCALEABILITY was ‘higher or lower’ than MEASURING OUTCOMES within the round of which prototype.
As an exercise, it enabled us to collectively and quickly de-spaghettify the plethora of questions, nooks, crannies and nuances that we needed to explore. Whilst un-conference was a possible way to do it, because of the volume of topics, there was a danger of getting caught up in discussing what we needed to discuss — so introducing play and structure enabled us to get to having the real discussion much sooner.
I’ll spare you the results of every round, but there were Sainsbury’s Taste The Difference White Chocolate Cookies on offer as a reward to focus minds!
The outcome of all of this was that we got through a significant amount of topics, questions and brought together wider conversations in to one space and as a result, we whipped through the topics and got some breakthrough movement.
It showed us that tough conversations can be had with a light touch and that creative ways of approaching ‘dry’ subjects can yield high levels of engagement and outcomes.
Well, that’s it for this (busy) week…
Until next week — over and out!
Ian James
