Coping with coronavirus: Values driven development

Agile delivery manager, Ryan Wyeth, explains how strongly embedded values have helped teams during the COVID-19 outbreak:

Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash

We’ve been pretty busy at BGL Tech lately…

Like most organisations, we’ve had to transition to working from home. One month into this ‘new norm’ and, for the most part, things feel the same yet different.

I’ve been continually impressed with how people, teams and departments have adapted so quickly. The delivery of value to our business and stakeholders has been largely unaffected and, in some cases, we’ve seen productivity increase.

Being the reflective, curious type, I spent some time this week with my two teams exploring why this is so. This blog post is born out of what we came up with.

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”
― Albert Einstein

Our values are in alignment

Our values at an organisational and team level are aligned and we practice them daily. The company values that were explained to me a little over a year ago when joining the company are more evident today than ever before. Be United. Be Ambitious. Be Creative. Be Authentic. #BeBGL

At a team level we continue to be obsessive about delivering good outcomes for our customers, we’re relentless in driving exceptional standards and take continuous improvement very seriously. We’re open, transparent and challenge each other positively. We’ve been busy trying new things, failing fast and applying our learnings and we definitely have fun doing it!

Remote quizzes, lunchtime Pictionary sessions, Lego challenges and the bizarre use of augmented reality during conference calls have all become the norm. I even facilitated a meeting with a Stormtrooper, donut and a potato this week!

Twice weekly lunchtime game of skribbl.io

The words highlighted above in bold have been lifted directly from the company values section on our website. What makes this really interesting is the fact that they can be mapped directly to the Scrum values which we hold ourselves accountable to as development teams. Intentional I’m sure…

Scrum Values

If my years of experience as a Scrum Master/Agile Coach in various organisations around the globe have taught me anything, it’s that without the Scrum values, we are just going through the motions and will not maximise the benefits of Scrum. We’ll simply be ‘doing agile’ and never really fully achieve the benefits of ‘being agile’.

There are five values and, fortunately, they are easy to remember. However, it can be difficult to understand what they mean, how to apply them, and how to recognise them in teams and individuals.

In my role as a servant leader, it’s one of my main responsibilities to coach and teach the team about these values. To be part of an organisation that is in alignment with these values and promotes them from the top down makes my job that much easier. It’s my observation that it’s often this absence of buy-in and understanding from senior management within organisations that make ‘agile transformation’ efforts slow or even impossible — in some cases with coaching needed upwards and sometimes sideways too.

Here are the Scrum values and some examples of how we implement them and conduct ourselves. Reflecting on this has been a great exercise for us as teams this week. Sticking to them will undoubtedly help us through these challenging times.

Focus

• When there are multiple issues (Why do they always come in threes?) focus helps our team determine what to tackle first, inspect our progress frequently, and try new experiments as we work towards a solution.
• Our focus on shared accountability to deliver the “Done” increment creates a focus on the overall outcome, not simply on what each individual can accomplish.
• Our product backlog is an ordered list, and that creates focus on what is the most important thing to do next.
• Time-boxed events create a sense of urgency and help us focus on the purpose of the event.
• We focus on flow and minimising waste, challenging ourselves to find new ways to get things done sooner.

Openness

• Being open about our work helps create transparency to our progress. Without transparency, any attempts to inspect and adapt will likely prove fruitless.
• Our openness enables team members to ask for help and offer help to each other. (Something new team members always comment on)
• The Sprint Retrospective’s focus on continuous improvement of our team’s interactions, processes, and tools invites an openness to feedback, reflection, and changing how we work.
• The Sprint Review demonstrates our openness to sharing progress with our stakeholders, as well as openness to feedback and collaboration with them.

Courage

• We promote the courage to be transparent about progress under pressure so we can help each other out more easily and set appropriate expectations.
• We have the courage to deliver on our commitments (sprint goal)
• Sometimes we might discover we built something our stakeholders don’t want but we have the courage to admit our assumptions were wrong and change direction and not dwell on it.
• We have the courage to admit our mistakes. This could apply to our technical work, our decisions, or how we conduct ourselves.

Commitment

• We commit to continuous improvement making it easier to change direction based on new information.
• We believe commitment is about dedication to doing our best. We cannot predict or control all of the complexities in software development, but we can commit to taking actions and adjusting our behaviours based on feedback and new learnings.
• We commit to living and breathing our company and team values and behaviours, holding each other to account when needed.

Respect

• We respect that people are naturally resourceful, creative, and capable of collaboratively solving complex problems. I try to empower and enable self-organisation within teams.
• We have respect for people’s diverse backgrounds, experiences, and range of skills, we believe this gives us an advantage in being able to effectively solve complex problems in creative ways.
• We respect that people are doing their best given what they know at the time, we enable transparency. We make it okay to change direction based on what we have learned.
• We show respect for people and assume they have good intentions, this creates a safe enviroment to have difficult conversations that help us figure out ways to resolve conflict and grow stronger as a team.
• We respect all opinions and perspectives, we want everyone to have the opportunity to be heard.

Stay safe everyone. Scrum on!

With over 10 million customers, BGL is a leading digital distributor of insurance and household financial services via brands including comparethemarket.com, Budget Insurance, Dial Direct and Beagle Street. It employs more than 3,000 people across its five sites in Peterborough, Sunderland, Wakefield, London and Paris.