Many companies have moved to adopt agile working practices for a number of different reasons; from merely jumping on the latest trend to outwardly appear progressive, to improving their business agility in order to stay competitive in the market.
The challenge facing Five
Five was founded in 2015 to build a complete autonomous vehicle system. Its team of computer scientists, engineers, and roboticists built a Level 4 urban automated driving system which was demonstrated in London in 2019.
Five took the lessons from that work and created a platform for the development and safety assurance of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and automated driving systems (ADS). In developing the platform and shifting business model, Five recognized the need to change from a research and problem-solving outlook to a more customer-centric product focus.
We needed to work more collaboratively to provide a cohesive platform that would be a strong offering and that serviced our customers’ needs. And we needed to be able to deliver at a sustainable pace, taking changes in our stride.
How we met the challenge
We decided to bring in a small team of agile coaches to help with this change at pace. We took this approach to make sure that the changes would be across the whole organization and would influence the culture, not just its practices or output.
So what does this look like in practice?
- Coaching and mentoring our people (many of whom are new to agile thinking and approaches)
- Improving visibility and transparency at every level of the business
- Helping teams to prioritize and stay aligned
- Focussing on delivering little but often
- Actively sharing knowledge and collaborating
- Increasing psychological safety
With this approach, and those outcomes at the forefront, we’re already able to see behaviours and patterns that align closely emerging. Additionally, the product team has been instrumental in making all high-level initiatives visible in one place and are currently in the process of unifying their roadmaps into a single view.
Whilst a big step forward, that alone would leave Five with a host of great product ideas but little understanding of their feasibility. With more precise advice on how and when product and engineering should be collaborating, we’re starting to see a much more refined prioritization of initiatives across engineering. Crucially, we’re also seeing initiatives being deprioritized.
With alignment at an engineering and product management level, the positive effects are starting to shine through in our teams and culture. For example, with priorities on cross-team initiatives clear and visible, teams can focus on one thing at a time and swarm where necessary. Increased alignment, visibility and clarity also mean that teams are able to plan further ahead than before. An additional bonus of greater visibility is that Five can adapt to new technological innovation, whether generated internally or due to forces moving in the wider industry.
What we learnt
“Variety is the spice of life” — William Cowper
As human beings, we learn and absorb information differently; therefore, we knew early on that a cookie-cutter approach to our coaching and mentoring wouldn’t work. We’ve been able to achieve what we have through a variety of methods, tools and techniques, including:
- Hosting large scale guilds and using Miro for facilitation
- Creating playbooks on the Gitlab-hosted company handbook
- Facilitating remote workshops within and across teams
- Equipping teams with the tools to measure their own progress as product delivery teams using Google Forms.
- Using Loom to deliver our ‘Brilliant at the Basics’ training videos on agile and product delivery topics. They’re self serve so people can get relevant tips as and when they need them.
One thing we perhaps underestimated — and have learnt along the way — is that no matter which medium you deliver something in or solve a problem with, if you don’t reaffirm the learning or find a way to continue living it, it’s incredibly easy for it to slip. So finding ways to bake things into your everyday routine is vital for success.
So, we’re finished, right?
Not Quite.
As with all transformative change, there isn’t an ‘end’. We’re constantly looking at ways to work smarter and deliver more value to our customers sooner.
For the coaching team and Five, the next steps revolve mainly around data. Thinking about:
- How do we gather data?
- What is useful to measure?
- What is that data telling us?
- How can we use it to make more informed decisions?
We’re beginning to answer some of those questions with the product delivery/agile maturity surveys teams have filled in. We as coaches receive an aggregated view across engineering, which helps us to identify any systemic issues, but the most prominent area we see value in is teams having the data in front of them to hold valuable conversations and be able to recognize where they want to improve and what their objectives may be.
What you can do
You may spot some challenges in this post that you recognize from your own workplace or patterns you’ve seen in the past and never managed to solve. Hopefully, we’ve given you some inspiration for how you can begin to tackle those.
If, however, the challenges you face are altogether different, there are some things we’d recommend that we’ve learnt along the way at Five:
- Spend time in the problem/challenge space. It’s very easy to become wedded to a solution, but you may be missing out on the real problem at hand. A different set of eyes or perspective can help here, either someone in a parallel team or a coach.
- Define what good looks like. For your teams, for your ways of working, for your communication. It’ll act as your North Star for continuous improvement.
- Inspect and adapt! Take time to reflect on how you’re doing something. Are we all clear on this meeting’s purpose? Did we achieve the goal we set out to? etc.
“The only thing that is constant is change.”
At Five, we are becoming more flexible as individuals, teams, and as an organization. Success doesn’t happen overnight, so be patient and embrace change in small or large increments… it’s your choice.
