Main takeaways from AgileTour London 2017

A colleague and I attended AgileTour 2017 at Pimlico on Friday October 20th.

I usually have low expectations from such events, as especially with a choice of talks to choose from every hour it usually ends up being hit-and-miss for me.

This time around however, every talk I attended was riveting; content, pacing, presentation, were all spot-on.

Highlights

Culture:

Culture by committee is useless

Culture is not something that can be enforced by a top-down approach. It’s a grass-root movement, an inclusive process that needs to involve key stakeholders in order to get everyone’s buy-in

Culture follows structure

“Attempting to change an organisation’s culture is a folly, it always fails. Peoples’ behaviour (the culture) is a product of the system; when you change the system peoples’ behaviour changes.”

Hire for Culture not Skills

Ideally get candidate to work with your team(s) on deliverables for at least one week as a (paid) trial. As well as a good indication of technical competency, a culture fit can be assessed. It’s easy for someone to be fake for a 2–3hrs long interview, much less so for a whole week

Diversity is crucial

“Culture fit” is about personality

The Happiness Advantage:

Happy teams are effective teams

Encourage your teams to laugh. In a previous workplace I remember being told off for “having too much fun”; while a line has to be drawn, generally speaking, a team that’s having fun at work are communicating better and have higher satisfaction levels. Happiness leads to success, not the other way around

Gratitude

Acknowledge and praise good behaviour. A thank you goes a long way

Celebrate learning

Reward learning with Cake/Fun Activity/etc

Efficiency:

“If you look at the five features of a high-performing team in Google’s Aristotle project, none of them was about the framework. 7–15% of what makes a successful project is technical skills and frameworks. Everything else is about human factors. So coach those first, they’re where the higher value is”

References:

AgileTour 2017 slides