How to embrace agile working — BGL Tech at Agile Cambridge
The BGL Tech team spent three days at Agile Cambridge — a conference dedicated to agile software development. As well as being a main sponsor of Agile Cambridge, the BGL Tech team were also keen to share their experience with agile practices and learn as much as possible from others. Here Change Delivery Manager Kevin Fish and the team share some of their key insights from this great event.
Don’t let prejudice get in the way
Keynote speaker Linda Rising
Linda opens by talking about prejudice and ultimately how this affects us in our working lives. But we’re not prejudiced, right? Well yes, we definitely are. It is, however, human nature.
A nice, simple example. Let’s assume you work in IT. How much of a pain is ‘the business’ right, or ‘the support team’? We very quickly apply labels and can focus on the negative interactions we have with those we’ve labelled.
Now clearly these labels and the context of business is much less divisive than the discussion of Brexiteer vs Remainer or Democrat vs Republican on social media, but it still holds you back from achieving your shared goals and that’s what Linda focuses us on - emphasising shared goals which without input from both parties would not be achieved. Selena Delesie talks about this interdependency in her keynote speech on day two.
Be ambitious
BGL Tech’s Milan Juza and Dan Bass spoke in their session entitled ‘Eyes on the Stars, Feet in the Mud’ about how BGL transformed a traditional insurance business into an agile, digital and technology-led organisation.
Intro to that dreaded 56k modem noise, a view of the 3D pipes screensaver and a short clip of the Microsoft exec team uncomfortably (more so for us in the room) dancing on a stage at the Windows 95 launch — scene set.
The session focuses on how to realise your ambitions as a team/department/business:
1. Ethos over process — Fit for purpose process that focuses on delivering the right business outcomes at a sustainable pace.
2. People and talent — Having a shared identity and purpose with a focus on collaboration and continuous improvement.
3. Rethinking tech — Tech enables and creates new value and keeping the tech stack healthy is everyone’s job, also be smart about legacy.
4. Structure matters (somewhat) — Team should be structured to encourage close engagement and collaboration, with communities of practice established to provide ongoing support and learning.
Maximise your 10 per cent time
Liz Pope talks through the idea that you devote a percentage of work time to R&D and learning, which was popularised by Google with their ‘20% time’. To make the most of this valuable time, Liz suggests adopting the following:
- Putting aside one day every two weeks to be creative / innovative.
- Rather than allowing everyone to choose the time, it was agreed to be every other Friday.
- No scheduled work or priorities.
- Time removed from sprint capacity.
- Make it easy to join and participate (new recruits understand the process).
6. Record demos or brownbags session so other can hear what has been done.
7. Encourage collaboration so its not one person but a few and keep getting buy-in from all groups.
Bring more soul to your work
Keynote Speaker — Selena Delesie
Selena’s talk focuses on the soul of Agile, what values we should hold close versus what values can be common in day-to-day business: ‘Go faster! Reduce Cost!’.
Instead, she suggests, should we be focusing on colleagues, family connections, smiles, improving each other, fun ? The list goes on.
Selena goes on to talk about ‘presensing’ ( defined as learning from the emerging future) and how to empower ourselves and our colleagues to achieve better outcomes by focusing on the positive.
Having an open mind, curiosity over ignorance and doubt. Compassion over hate and anger. Courage over fear. If you adopt these three positives the magic will start to happen.
Fix ghastly remote meetings
A practical but important point here. Do you work in a distributed team? Does your company make use of remote working?
Both are pretty common these days but what is also common is that feeling when you have yet another dreaded virtual meeting. Here we go, another waste of my time [sad face].
It almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy - if you think it’s going to be bad it probably will be. But the causes usually will be pretty obvious and, with some pretty simple rules of engagement, your remote meetings (and face to face) can be much better. I’ll list a few of the key takeaways but the full list is here.
1. Sort the tech out! There are loads of online collaboration tools out there, not all will work all the time right out of the box. If you don’t face into and address these issues it’s probably not worth you reading the next points.
2. Do not underestimate the value of a good facilitator and a pre-published agenda.
3. Make sure everyone is engaged with the meeting, especially remote participants if operating a hybrid meeting.
4. Make sure participants don’t talk over each other — agree on a code of conduct for remote meetings.
Embrace creativity and draw inspiration from the arts and humanities
Keynote speaker — Ashley Hunsberger (Twitter: aahunsberger)
Ashley talks through his concerns about the de-prioritisation of liberal arts, humanities and critical thinking subjects in lieu of a focus on STEM activities.
This definitely resonated with us. While our tech team is heavily involved in STEM activities in our local area we do ensure that all sessions also embrace creativity.
BGL colleague Chris Knox talks here about how we have got the creative juices flowing at the STEM workshops we co-ordinate.
We’re also supporting the Lego League. This is where groups of children aged 6–9 research a project and identify potential real-world problems. They then design and build a LEGO model to demonstrate a solution. There were some truly inspiring designs at this year’s event, which focused on Mission Moon.
Create a safe place to talk
Based on the book Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When the Stakes are High we understand the pitfalls of mishandling important conversations. We can all probably recall that time where we needed to have a difficult conversation about a particularly tight deadline and leaving the conversation knowing someone wasn’t happy with the result — or the subject was avoided all together?
Chris Smith at Redgate gave some insight about how we are hardwired to react differently based on what drives us (our chimp) and how understanding other people’s drivers as well as our own will help us better engage with each other.
BGL Tech’s Danny Brader said: “It made me realise that I am quite emotional and that I need to be aware of my chimp (my drivers), in difficult situations I will be making a conscious effort to step back to better achieve consensus with colleagues.”
Chris also recommends reading Chimp Paradox by Steve Peters.
Flow is your friend
With BGL Tech’s focus on continuous improvement Santander’s Ben Nicholls’ talk ‘My journey with flow and why it floats my boat’ couldn’t have been better timed. Ben explains how trying to convince teams and individuals that flow is important with purely data is not easy, data doesn’t appeal to everyone so it’s right to vary your approach. So what better way is there to get your message across than an interactive session crafting origami boats?
Ben talks us through how to facilitate a session where teams compete against each other to achieve the best flow. In the session teams try multiple techniques, inspect and adapt in an attempt to increase flow.
Klaus Leopold was the originator of this idea. If you’re interested check out his blog here.
Final thoughts
I was surprised for a three-day agile conference how little I actually spoke about agile, and I think that’s fine.
As I’m writing this I stop to talk to a couple of people and we discuss how the conference focuses on the softer skills, how we influence, challenge and motivate ourselves and our colleagues. About how facing into these challenges enables us to adopt better working practices and continually improve, whether that’s using an agile framework or another development methodology.
And really my final thoughts
Thank you to the Agile Cambridge team for running the event, it’s been seamless from start to finish. And thank you to BGL Tech for continually pushing us to develop and investing in our shared future!
