INTRO TO AGILE MINDSETBUSINESS VALUE

AGILE AS A SERVICE

DENIS BAZHIN, NOVEMBER 2017

AGILE MINDSET BASE

• Fail fast with an EXPERIMENT

• Setup and control your/team/project/stakeholders vision

• Vision defines a BORDER for any experiment

• Setup, control and develop a FLOW

• At personal level

• At team level

• At project level

• At business domain level…

• Scale as you want

• + some other mindset development magic

WHAT’S A FLOW?

• A FLOW is the special state of consciousness of a person

• A FLOW is the best outcome

• A FLOW is an automatic expertize development

• A FLOW is the best communication

• A FLOW is a customer satisfaction

• A FLOW is a self-dependence (no PM needed)

• A FLOW is… much more than you can imagine

THE FLOW BORDERS?

• Lower border: boredom limitation

• Upper border: fear limitation

• What’s are the signs for both borders?

• NO effective common/standard symptoms

• INDIVIDUAL symptoms only

• Agile mindset setup starts at this point

• Special rules to define borders symptoms

• Defined symptoms scalability using more special rules

AGILE MINDSET IS - A WAY OF THINKING- DECISION MAKING SPEED- ARCHITECTURE SIMPLIFICATION- SYSTEM SOLUTIONS- HIGHEST RESPONSIBILITY

SCRUM, KANBAN, ETC. ARE AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT, NOT MINDSET!

/!\ AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT DOES NOT BUILD A MINDSET! /!\

REAL EXAMPLES

• MERA NN CI & TA team:

• Common flow speeds up outcome to 6 times

• Common flow simplifies an architecture solution for TA framework:

• A win: 2 months for the 1st working auto test case VS 1.5 years for competitors

• A win: expertize sharing is triggered automatically between team and stakeholders

• A win: architecture is so simple to support by any JAVA engineer

• Common flow is a flat team structure

• No management

• Very close team internal and external (stakeholders/customer) communication

• Many people want to be a team member

WAS CI & TA A DREAM TEAM?Oleg K., JAVA developer

I’ve been working in CI&TA team for more than

3 years (2011-2014). It was a pleasure for me

to be a part of such professional team. We had

interesting and challenging tasks, used modern

technologies and approaches. We had legible

work process set up either within team as for

interaction with other teams, where every team

member knew what and how to do at every time

in every situation. And we were glad to receive

feedbacks about our work from our customers

and people we worked with.

Dmitry K., Stakeholder

I wanted to be a CI&TA team member

because cool dudes did cool things.

I've been working in neighbor team in 2011-

2016 but every day I saw what CI&TA team

doing. It was very different tasks and

complex targets and that guys solved them

so quickly so I became excited because I love

automation and I like to work hard and fast.

For me CI&TA team looks like a really sport

team with very close interaction between

members

Denis B., Team leader, Agile integrator

That was a true story. I was happy to get rid

of a harmful management so that a team

could breathes freely in a common flow. Also

our Customer helps a lot with a very high

trusting level. That’s why we decided one

day to switch from a standard Scrum to

Common Sense, and we won. Another win is a

flat structure, everybody can substitute

everybody, even we have too different skills.

Roman M., newcomer

I was a student and was very nervous during

interviewing in 2016, because CI&TA team

leader asked me to choose what I want to

learn in the variety of IT areas. I did not

choose that time, but I was invited to CI&TA

team after two weeks and I‘m happy to work

with such versatile professionals

Vladislav P., Stakeholder

I’ve been working with CI&TA in

2016-2017. How they did this

magic? So fast prototyping (2

months!!!) before 1st working auto

test case! Moreover, prototype was

well-extendible and was very

simple to study. Also these great

professionals provided an

immediate feedbacks and

unbelievable speed of support

and knowledge sharing! I learned

a lot and now I know what is real

Agile

AGILE MINDSET AS A SERVICE?

• Why not?

• Scrum is a business ALREADY ;)

• Each service starts with evaluation

• Agile mindset CAN be evaluated

• But with face 2 face interviewing only

• Focus on “how person answers

questions” before “what person

answers”

AGILE MINDSET SCALABLE EVALUATION

• Vision: Does every team member could give an answer on the following

questions: What is my value for this team/company? What I am doing in current

moment regarding my working activities? What is the purpose of my work? How

result of my work is used? (A standard vision check)

• Vision: Could you please draw a model of your team/project? (Pay an attention

to the picture: either we have hierarchy or the flat model)

• Vision: What does your project/program manager do? (Vertical communication

check. Let interviewer to choose an concrete area)

• Personal flow control: Does every team member could try his/her ideas

regarding routing work improvements in any moment? (In which moment he/she

can?) (check if new ideas are not dropped)

• Personal flow control: How ASAP activities are handled? (FLOW check related

question)

• Personal responsibility control: how failures are handled in your team/project?

(any fails, important to allow person to choose fail area, e.g. bug, process,

communication. That’s an Agile mindset detection question based on flow

borders recognition)

• Personal responsibility control: Do you have a public discussions regarding

critical failures root cause analysis? (public actions and public responsibility –

one more flow check)

• Personal responsibility control: Do you have a public planning of the

project/team activities? (public responsibility and iterations as a part of the

team common flow)

• Personal responsibility control: Do you (your team members) fix the code written

by other team members/teams (communication and responsibility check –

common flow)

• Leadership: Do you have a person(s) whom eliminates all obstacles in the way

of the team(s)? (double-shot, from one hand checks leadership understanding,

from other hand checks if a team\project has a good communication leader like

ScrumMaster or Product Owner. Both point to flow borders control)

• Communication: Do you have team-chat? (speeds up communication a lot)

• Communication: Question to leaders and managers. How do you determine that

your words understood correctly by teams/team members? (vertical

communication check –scaled flow detection point)

• Communication: Question to leaders and managers. Which hobbies your team

members have? (horizontal scalable flow)

SO SIMPLE EVALUATION, WILL IT WORK?

• Why not? It’s a starting point for other

dialogs, like implementation coach or

other evaluations, e.g. CI/CD

• Do things simple but not easier than they

can be

• An outcome of such evaluation are

recommendations only without direct

implementation instructions! That’s a

mindset key – try yourself and find the

best way

Denis Bazhin

https://www.linkedin.com/in/denis-bazhin

https://www.facebook.com/chillamb

Continuous Software Engineering

IS

the FUTURE