Workshop Summary: Agile Ways of Working
Last week, part of the Heist team attended a three-day workshop on Agile Ways of Working at Hyper Island.Through this collaborative process, agile stresses the importance of self-leadership where one is open to learning and growing, rather than being closed off and seemingly all-knowing. The agile mindset is one that can maneuver around problem solving even when new and unexpected factors come into play — a skill that is becoming increasingly important in a rapidly changing world.
We were confronted with this reality when introduced to the session’s icebreaker: the Kanban Pizza Game. Many readers may be wondering: what is Kanban? Kanban — which means ‘signboard’ in Japanese — is a technique developed by Toyota’s industrial engineer Taichi Ohno. The simplest way to view the Kanban method is through the second photograph below: during a process there is a task backlog and a “to do, doing, and done” column which changes as the project progresses. This approach is not new to Heist as we have incorporated it in our workflow already, however the Kanban Pizza Game was a new element. The rules are as follows: participants are split into teams and asked to create as many slices of pizza as possible in a limited amount of time and creating as little waste as possible — the team with the most slices win the challenge. But there is a twist: as the game progresses, new rules are introduced, which can make or break the process.
Next, we were given a problem statement: over the next couple of days we would have to work in an agile way within our teams to come up with a solution to reduce the waste of plastic delivery parcels. An interesting way to approach the problem was the causes and effects ‘tree’ exercise. We wrote our problem statement in the middle — and what we thought were the causes went below, at the “root” — and the effects went on top, where the leaves and branches would go. For example, one cause for the excess plastic parcels could be that plastic is lightweight, durable and waterproof, and one effect could be the harmful environmental impact. As the causes and effects begin to accumulate, it allows us to quickly map out and visualize the issue at hand through different angles.
During the three-day process, we had to time-box everything in order to truly be agile. We had daily check-ins, came up with How Might We statements, prioritized them, conducted rapid-fire intercept interviews, prototyped continuously, and created a presentation — so much to do and so little time to do it! However, all of that was made possible when adopting an agile mindset and under the watchful eye of the team’s scrum master. A scrum master is the ‘servant leader’ within the team that works to remove impediments. For example, one of the impediments was that we needed more materials to create a prototype, so the scrum master was responsible for finding and providing the necessary tools. The scrum master is key in the agile environment because he or she has an overview of the project and allows the development team to focus on the task at hand.
At the end of the workshop, the team members all gave each other gifts — the gift of feedback. Indeed feedback is an essential part of the agile way of working so one can keep improving continuously each and every day. All in all, this workshop was a truly great experience — this training will without a doubt be a strong addition to future projects at Heist.
