Agile Transformation Kick-Off. Workfusion
This is a long read :) Be prepared.
For the last years I’ve initiated 5 different Agile transformations. Different companies, IT and non-IT, large enterprises and startups. People asked me if there is any recipe of kick-off. Well, I would say no, there is no single way or single plan. But in this article I will share one example of such workshop I made for Workfusion in Minks in September 2017. This workshop is an example of a Large Scaled Scrum transformation kick-off.
In this article I will give you a script for 5-day transformation kick-off meeting, with detailed description and purpose of each day, as well as tools and practices I used.
About the customer
WorkFusion develops software products that let enterprise leaders digitize their operations. For more than 7 years their AI-powered business process automation software has helped customers improve customer service, reduce operational cost and drive revenue.
Much of the company’s development is performed by a large and rapidly growing engineering team in Minsk.
In order to rapidly scale and anticipate the significant rise in demand for their product by demanding enterprise businesses around the world, Workfusion decided to strengthen their development team’s fluency in Agile practices.
Based on the challenges list I proposed 5-day Agile Transformation Workshop. The proposed plan was the following:
Agile Awareness & Desire to Change
Day 1. Agile Introduction.
Goal: to make everyone develop a common understanding of what Agile really is.
Day 2. Agile at Scale.
Goals: discuss Scaling of Agile. Present Large Scaled Scrum. Make everyone understand what LeSS is and how to apply it at their company.
Organizational Changes. Building new Agile Company
Day 3. Speak about the organization. Current challenges from the teams.
Goal: identify what we can make better with tools we’ve learned for the last 2 days.
Day 4. Agree on a new organization.
Goal: create a new organizational Status Quo, draw the new organization and its new rules.
Building up Ability of Change and Ground Rules
Day 5. Get together, present the new way of working we’ve built to all the colleagues, let them challenge it and finally agree on the rules and the next steps.
Full initial plan of training is available on this link. This plan has been changed a lot during training, by the way :)
So, let's go into details :)
Part 1. Agile Awareness & Desire to Change
If you remember A.D.A.P.T model, the basis is to make people Aware about a change and get the Desire to make it. The first 2 days of the training were fully focused on creation of Awareness and Desire. There were about 60 people during those 2 days. Initial plan for those days is available here.
Day 1. Agile and Scrum
On the first day we covered Agile Principles and Scrum Framework. The plan was the following:
Module 1. Specification Game
We started the workshop with a game that usually represents the most painful problem of all teams. It’s known as Specification game.
During the game they usually make an evolution from waterfall to incremental delivery. Then you can ask them every round what helped them to improve? How can they make it even better? How can they share the practices across the teams?
Module 2. Agile History. Agile Principles
From Henry Ford to modern organizations!
Yes, this is the best time to give a reason to people why Agile is so popular now and what we try to achieve switching to it.
When we started discussing Agile Principles I gave them the task to discuss in groups what each of the principles means for them and how it’s followed now in their organization.
This gives a tons of feedback about the organizational state of:
- Collaboration
- Delivery planning
- Client focus
At the end we discussed frameworks inside Agile. Mostly we focused on Scrum as it was the primary framework we had learned with them during the training.
Module 3. CYNEFIN Framework. Complexity
It’s not enough just to know the Principle, teams need to understand when it’s more applicable to use Scrum.
I usually play a game with them to make them understand the change of complexity by way of a real example. This is a 4-exercise game that represents Simple-Complicated-Complex-Chaos.
Simple: ask the group to stay in the line by people’s height. Take a look how they make it. Is there any managers identified? How is it? What do they do to finish this exercise?
Complicated: ask them to stay by people’s height and T-Short color. More complicated, 2 factors! What is the primary factor? Debrief with them.
Complex: ask them to make a chaotic movement around the room, independently. Ask them to stop, take a look at the room, find 2 other people and remember them. Then, each person needs to build an equilateral triangle with the selected people. That’s gonna be interesting! They will make it very fast. Than ask them to show how good their triangle is using their fingers. Take a look around, the average will be 4. No managers, full power on team level, very fast finish. Yes, not perfect, but within this complexity it will never be perfect.
This is where Scrum comes to their table. Now they know that Scrum empowers teams to make the best decision they can cause only teams know how to make it better.
Module 4. Scrum in a Nutshell. Framework, Roles, Events.
I started with Customer, Customer Value Stream and Customer-focused business. Through this prism I entered Scrum — customer-oriented, business-driven, iteration framework.
The end of Module 4 was dedicated to Scrum Events. At the end of the day I made a classic Scrum Retrospective (Good->Challenges->Solutions) with the group. We identified the challenges we had at the moment. Then I asked them to think what from these challenges list could be fixed by Scrum.
Debrief from this exercise: not everything can be fixed by Scrum, this is not a panacea from everything. But Scrum will make problems visible and guide them to the surface, so you’ll have to do something with them.
Day 2. Scrum at Scale. Large Scaled Scrum
We started Day 2 with a refresh of Day 1. Usually I visualize everything and make a lot of posters during a workshop, so I asked the group to walk around the room and take a look at the posters to refresh their knowledge, make notes, discuss with colleagues.
Module 1. Team Coaching Session using Metaphorical Drawing
This was not a part of the initial plan. To be fair I changed a lot from the initial training agenda “on the fly”. After Day 1 I noticed there were some problems in teams intercommunication, in their understanding of how company worked. I wanted them to take a look at themselves from the outside.
So I found it reasonable to make a Drawing Game. As we had 9 small teams in the training group, that was an individual exercise for each team. I asked them to take a flip-chart paper, color markers and find some place in the room. Then they had 30 minutes to Draw their organization in the way they imagined it. I.e. in a metaphorical way. For example, teams are cities, between some of the cities there is a highway, between others no road at all.
When people draw they are very fair because they are lead by emotions. After 30 minutes we made an exposition of pictures and discussed them all. We made a list of “what is common for all the pictures” to make them understand the common organizational patterns. By discussing the pictures we can see how people explain their challenges in another way.
As an outcome of the exercise we had an organizational view of how the company was working. That was a great intro to Large Scale Scrum — now we could take a look at how we could improve the organization.
Module 2. Large Scaled Scrum
There was nothing really interesting there from the perspective of training practice. I made an illustration of LeSS, we discussed it in groups and then publicly summarized our thoughts about it.
We discussed the main difference between Scaled Agile Framework and Large Scale Scrum, and how we could benefit from each.
We also covered the topic of how applicable LeSS was for our organization and how we could benefit from it taking into account our goals and current challenges.
Module 3. Larmans’ Law of Organizational Changes. Draw our Future
After lunch we switched to discussion of the actual change. What do we need to become Agile tomorrow?
We discussed the question of organizational Status Quo and what we need to make a real change for the better.
That was a great entrance to the next exercise— Draw your future organization.
We used the same metaphorical approach but now people were asked to imagine the target organization they would like to build. There was a requirement: this should be a client oriented organization.
At the end we debriefed what we had to do from cultural, collaboration and structure perspectives for our company to become the target organization.
The end of Day 2 we spent in discussion of open questions. I asked teams to make a wall of questions they would like us to discuss and find the answers to them within the next 2 days.
Part 1. Summary
Let’s summarize Part 1 of the 5-day transformation workshop. The main goal was to build Awareness and Desire.
The first day was mostly for Awareness. At the end I made a retro meeting where I mapped teams’ challenges to Scrum to show them what they can change with Scrum and where they need other tools.
On the second day I used a metaphorical approach to draw the organization. By discussing LeSS we understood how to be better on organization level, so we drew our future organization we all would build. We made a list of key benefits of such organization and how to achieve it. That was creation of Desire of Change.
Part 2. Organizational Changes. Building a new Agile Company
The second step of the transformation kick-off was to define the new company structure and rules of work. Before the workshop we decided with the customer to spend these 2 days in a smaller group to be more efficient in collaboration.
The group participants had been selected before the workshop. During the first 2 days we added some people to that list.
The goal was to define and agree on:
- How we work. This means structure, frameworks, collaboration, rules etc.
- How we start. What is the minimum we will start with.
- What we need to make it happen. Build the Roadmap of transformation
Day 3. Current State
We started Day 3 right after the weekend (on Monday). The day consisted of 2 parts:
- Actual process of work — how we manage our job today.
- Manage the Challenges — how will we work with challenges using the tools we have.
Actual Process of Work
The first thing we made was visualizing the current development process, starting from receiving the request from business and finishing with deploying the work to production.
This kind of visualization brings understanding of current SDLC and its problems. We easily debriefed systematic challenges from it, such as time for testing, length of development, overlapping of releases (we had not finished one but started the next) etc.
Working with Challenges
We wrote all the challenges on stickers and mapped them to that flow. Then teams had the task to find all possible solutions to fix those problems.
After that we selected the most appropriate solutions and discussed them, so we had the new work agreement documented. For example, we agreed on:
- As we have a limited amount of Quality Assurance engineers in teams, developers need to help them in testing.
- We have to be focused on automation starting from Unit Testing and Integration Testing.
We took a look at the wall we had created with colleagues at the end of Day 2 and marked the items we found the answers for.
Day 4. Building up the new Organization
On Day 4 we got to the point when we knew most of our pain points, we knew how to fix them with Scrum & LeSS, we knew what to do with items that cannot be fixed by process and we had a visualization of company we would try to build.
Process redefinement
On Day 4 we took the current process step-by-step and redesigned it to a new workflow that used Scrum on Team level and LeSS as a framework of scale.
How did we make it? It was a series of exercises in small groups when each group suggested an approach, we discussed it altogether and mapped it to the process piece by piece.
The ground rule for design was: we should keep the flow as simple as possible. I challenged team every time to simplify what they had already done.
During the design session we discussed:
- Content of Definition of Done. What would we like to add to eliminate the current challenges
- Definition of Ready. What do we need to have to start working with tasks?
- What, when and how do we make every meeting and use every process/tool within this flow?
- What are the questions we still have to address (red stickers)?
- Agreements to follow (big yellow stickers)
- Release scope definition.
Teams Structure and Composition
During the next part of the day we discussed and worked on the composition of each team in the flow.
Every team leader told about his/her team and people inside it. We discussed missed roles and possible replacements. During this exercise we changed the team structure a bit, changed people’s allocation, merged some teams to one.
Part 2. Summary
During the Day 3 and 4 of the transformation workshop we went through the flow:
- Describe how we work now. Visualize the current Timeline of delivery
- Understand its challenges
- Using the knowledge we have, find the way to fix these challenges
- Design new flow step-by-step by finding the best approaches suggested in the group
- Challenge this flow and try to simplify it
- Define Teams
- Map questions and answers to the flow, so we know where we should work more and where we have approaches agreed and specified.
Part 3. Building up Ability of Change and Ground Rules
After 4 days working together we were … tired :) But inspired! This is the last section of the 5-Day workshop. Probably, the most important.
The goal of this part:
- Challenge the flow we’ve build
- Update the flow and finalize it
- Agree altogether on new way of working
- Make a plan of transition
Flow Presentation
We started with presentation of the flow we had drawn during the last 2 days. We talked about the challenges we had tried to address with the new approaches. We talked about the questions we left unanswered during the last 2 days.
There was a lot of questions and discussions. We updated the flow a bit, mapped new decisions and agreed on low-level details.
Next, I asked people to sit together in teams they agreed to work in in future. Each team had the same task: “Prepare the plan: what you’re gonna do starting from tomorrow to implement this plan.”
The result of the exercise we mapped to the timeline for the next 2 months. This was a short-term transformation plan.
Team Manifesto Exercise
I spent a lot of time thinking about how to finalize the workshop, so it ends with clear new cultural and working agreements. I made the Team Manifesto Exercise.
We got back to the Agile Manifesto for a while. We had one more round of its discussion and took a look at how it had been influencing our decisions over the last 4 days. We took a look at how we had aligned with Agile practices.
Then we developed our own Workfusion Teams’ Manifesto
We spent about 2 hours in groups phrasing the key messages, grouping them and clearing the list, discussing the meaning of each sentence. And we ended up the workshop with the following Manifesto:
We build our Manifesto on top of the Values of our Company
Our goal is to deliver the high quality software
We know the business value of a task we are working on
If we don’t get feedback that means feature is done in vain
We solve real customers’ problems, not their symptoms
We know how to use our product
We are ready to sustainable changes
We promise to follow the process we agreed on
We communicate for result
If we have a problem we address it as soon as possible
We don’t assume. We ask and validate a hypothesis
We don’t take into work more than we can accomplish
We automate everything
We work, win and lose together!
And it all should be fun!
I think this was the best ending up of our workshop possible. We were very happy with the result.
Part 3. Summary
During Day 5 of the workshop we got together to make the final agreement on processes and tools we were starting to use.
Altogether we discussed the output of the transformation team achieved during Days 3 and 4. We got to the same level of understanding within the company, challenged the suggested approaches and together found the relevant answers.
We made a short-term plan that pushed us to start right after the workshop. And we made a Team Manifesto — our new common rules of work.
5 Days Transformation Workshop Summary
Let’s summarize. 5 days, 3 parts.
First 2 days — make people synchronize about the meaning of Agile and Scrum. Let them understand how they can benefit from it. We gathered, structured and mapped all the challenges of the teams and together found how Scrum works for them. We drew the organization we would like to build.
Next 2 days — design the change, build our organization, set its rules and processes, define agreements.
Last day — agree altogether and take the responsibility to change by creating a plan and manifesto (a kind of a gentlemen's agreement).
About Coach
Evgeniy Labunskiy — coach, Agile Trainer, Certified Scrum Master & Product Owner, SAFe Agilist and LeSS Practitioner. Evgeniy has overall 10 years of experience within IT industry (outsourcing and in-house development), 8 years in Agile Environment. He worked with customers from US, EU and Asia market, successfully finished over 30 different projects.
For the last years Evgeniy focused on large Agile transformations for IT and non-IT companies. Currently Evgeniy is helping BNP Paribas Bank (Ukrainian branch) and PUBM (local UA bank) with their trip to Agile, coaching teams and top-managers
Evgeniy is a professional trainer and facilitator. Only during 2017 he trained in Lean & Agile over 500 people in Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia. Evgeniy has a strong development background (Microsoft .NET). Co-founder and co-owner of Scrum Ukraine — a coaching company focused on strategic organizational changes. Active participant of Ukrainian Agile Community, speaker on conferences and Agile promoter.
