My trip to Agile Manchester 2018
Last week I traveled across the country to share Redgate’s journey so far with team autonomy at the Agile Manchester conference. It was a great conference; friendly people, valuable sessions, inspiring speakers and a brilliant venue.
The talk I gave with my colleague, Elizabeth Ayer, was on the first afternoon of the conference and it seemed to go well. We spoke to about 45 people, so not the busiest room ever but not a vacuum. People seemed engaged, they laughed in most of the right places and we got some positive comments afterwards. Phew.
As our talk was on the first day, the pressure and anxiety of public speaking quickly lifted, leaving behind it relief and a glow of achievement, allowing me to focus on and enjoy the rest of the conference. If you’d like to hear about my highlights from the conference, read on…
Beyond Budgeting — business agility in practice by Bjarte Bogness
The conference opened with Bjarte’s wide-ranging keynote about business agility. In his session, he questioned the sense of an annual budget in the face of today’s expectations of dynamic business plans, agility and speed of response. Painting it as an archaic approach best suited to companies 100 years ago and arguing that a year’s ‘batch size’ is too big for detailed financial planning. What we need is continuous delivery of resources, he argued. Meeting your annual budget should not be considered a success; the budget is likely to have constrained your ability to meet the real company goals.
He contrasted those who want to run businesses in a command and control fashion (Theory X people), who feel the budget gives them a (misplaced) feeling of control, and those who want to create an intrinsically motivating workplace where people have the freedom to act and where a clear purpose is supported by transparency, clear organisational values and a sense of belonging.
Statoil (Bjarte’s employer) have radically and successfully applied a fully transparent approach to employee expenses, opening-up what everyone has spent so everyone else can see it. Yes, Bjarte says, someone will occasionally do something bad and take advantage of that trust, but it doesn’t mean you were wrong to trust. He then coined my favourite quote from the whole conference, “you don’t put everyone in jail just because one person commits a crime”.
The session was spectacularly good and tapped into my fundamental beliefs about the power of great teams in an open, empowered environment.
Using OKRs: what I wish we’d know when we started by Neil Vass
Neil’s session appealed to me because we’ve been using OKRs at Redgate for over 18 months now, and whilst they have helped us improve how teams focus, they have been difficult to get right and have proved laborious for the teams.
Hearing Neil’s description of OKRs, why and how they rolled them out in his corner of the BBC was a nice reminder of the benefits we are aiming for. Hearing their troubles with Key Results and the time it took to set OKRs the first time they tried, normalised our experiences and made me feel a bit better about our efforts. We’ve been trying to apply these to 9 teams, let alone 1, so it’s no wonder we’ve found it hard!
Values in the workplace by Tobias Mayer
Day two’s keynote was as impactful as Bjarte’s on day one, but on a much more personal level. Tobias started by asking us all to move the 200 or so chairs in the room to the side and gather around, which certainly jolted everyone awake; “crap, I’m going to have to talk to someone before I’ve had a coffee!” I thought. But the icebreaker was natural and set the mood for the rest of the hour.
Tobias talked about how many, many companies call out a set of values or a mission statement appearing to codify the principles that underpin the organisation. Many of those companies then fail to follow those values in their day-today operation, rendering them useless or, worse, disingenuous.
He then moved on to ask us to think about our own personal values; what principles do we hold most dear in our approach to working life. In the couple of minutes we had to think about that I came up with these; Be honest AND respectful, grow others, be deliberate. The real kicker was that Tobias then asked us to share a time where we had not lived up to those values yesterday! This was an all too easy task and made me think twice about being so scornful about the companies that stray from their own “values”.
In his call to action, Tobias encouraged us to think about why we do what we do; to deliberately call that out and then think about what concrete things we will do to move closed to those ideals. Inspiring stuff.
Data ethics at the Co-op by Ian Thomas and Danny McCarthy
Ian and Danny described how Co-op Digital have started using a modified version of the Open Data Institute’s Data Ethics Canvas (below) as a thinking tool to prepare their teams for new projects. It helps. Although it is the responsibility of Project Management to ensure this is filled out, the teams are heavily involved in the process helping them consider aspects like limitations with the data laws/policies & classification of the data, and how they’ll communicate the purpose of the work.
Ian and Danny seemed very calm about the introduction of the GDPR regulations. When I asked them whether they had needed to add any new practices or processes in advance of these new rules, they said that given the existing requirements of Data Protection and their experience of the regulatory needs for Co-Op Insurance, they are in very good shape with only peripheral systems needing dedicated work. A bonus discovered in the talk was this handy gif that Co-op Digital put together to help explain the regulation for their employees:
Growing or distributing teams? Think like open-source by Paul Shannon
Paul bravely battled through some crazy AV issues (“I’ve just pushed the connector through the wall”) to tell us about how his company eLife are using as open-source approach to develop their scientific publishing and hosting software.
Amongst some great tips for distributed team working, Paul talked about the inspirational purpose that eLife has, the why they do what they do, “Our mission is to help scientists accelerate discovery by operating a platform for research communication that encourages and recognises the most responsible behaviours in science”. This tied in with some Bjarte said in his session — that a key leadership principle was to create a clear sense of purpose, “engage and inspire people around a bold and noble cause, not around short-term financial targets”. I thought eLife’s mission was a great example of this!
Transforming to a product engineering culture: what it is and how far have we got? By David Halsey and Sully Rafiq
David and Sully from MoneySupermarket.com spoke about their move from a team structure set-up to complete a large-scale platform rebuild towards an ongoing product team approach. They told us about the Car Insurance team who have been piloting this change in approach to significant effect.
This session was great as Moneysupermarket are trying to do many of the same things that we are trying to do at Redgate; create more autonomous teams, give clear purpose, bake quality in, use OKRs to focus on outcomes, etc, etc. It was a bit like looking at a presentation we could be giving — except they were much more deliberate and clear about what they wanted to achieve with this move, whereas I feel we have lost sight of how positive our endeavors to create empowered teams with freedom to act is.
Moneysupermarket used similar material to Redgate as inspiration for their move — like Dan Pink’s Drive. However, their slides were a catalyst for me to go and read more about Google’s Project Aristotle and psychological safety. We should reflect more on those subjects at Redgate.
It was here that Simon Sinek’s TED talk about “start with why” was referenced. So, I decided to skip the next session and watch the video.
Sidebar on How great leaders inspire action by Simon Sinek
I found a breakout room at the venue and hunkered down to watch Simon’s talk. It was incredibly inspirational, as I’m keen to improve how I lead in my role at Redgate. He explains how great leaders motivate and enact change by stating their beliefs initially, rather than what they are going to do (which is the norm for ‘other’ leaders). By stating their beliefs, people can understand why they do what they do and, if those people share these beliefs, then they may take the leaders cause as their own. “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”, repeats Sinek metronomically.
I am here for an argument — working with conflict in teams by Stephen Mounsey
Back at the conference… I really enjoyed Stephen’s talk on conflict in a particularly dysfunction team from one of his recent engagements as an agile coach at Infinity Works. He shared some great stories and showed Monty Pythons “is this the right room for an argument?” sketch — which I love! He tried lots of ideas to move troubled teams towards healthy conflict; great retro activities, the 5 dysfunctions of a team, fist of five, etc.
The interesting take-away at the end was that after the team was given these many tools and opportunities to improve, the core clash between team members’ personal beliefs meant they never reached consistent healthy conflict. So, sometimes, the team’s membership just needs to change — for the good of all.
Redgaters speaking at conferences
Thank you to Redgate for covering the travel, meal and accommodation expenses for our trip to Manchester! Redgate is always keen to support staff presenting at software development conferences, whenever possible. We believe it is valuable to share our ideas and insights with the rest of the community and get our name/qualities ‘out there’. We also believe it is valuable for Redgaters improve their experience of public speaking and, of course, attending a conference is an opportunity to be inspired by our peers and bring innovative approaches & new perspectives back to the office.
This post was first published on LeadingAgileTeams on 11th May 2018.
