Easy Agile Podcast Ep.4 Em Campbell-Pretty, CEO & Managing Director at Pretty Agile

"It was amazing to talk with Ida and Ulrika from TietoEVRY, they are truly leading the way in sustainability" - Rebecca Griffith

Rebecca and Caitlin are talking with Ida and Ulrika from TietoEVRY, about big picture sustainability and the role of business in supporting sustainability initiatives.

🌍 Implementing sustainability in daily business operations
🌍 The role of technology in advancing sustainability
🌍 Ensuring your sustainability & DEI report doesn't turn into a stagnant document
🌍 Framing challenge in a way of opportunity
🌍 Getting the whole team on board

An important listen for everyone, enjoy!

📲 Subscribe/Listen on your favourite podcasting app.

Transcript

Caitlin Mackie:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast. I'm Caitlin, marketing coordinator at Easy Agile.

Rebecca Griffith:

And I'm Beck, team and operations assistant at Easy Agile, and we'll be your host for this episode. Before we begin, we'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast today, the worthy, worthy people of the Tharawal nation and pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging. We extend that same respect to all aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders people joining us today.

Caitlin Mackie:

Today, we're joined by Ida and Ulrika from TietoEVRY. Welcome. Thanks for joining us.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Thank you so much for having us.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Thank you.

Rebecca Griffith:

It would be great if we could start with some introductions. Ida and Ulrika, could you tell our listeners a bit about yourselves and your role at TietoEVRY?

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Yes, of course. I'm Ida and I'm heading up the sustainability team at TietoEVRY since four years back. And Ulrika?

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Yeah. I work within the sustainability team as a sustainability manager also here at TietoEVRY.

Rebecca Griffith:

Excellent. Thank you. Thanks for the introductions. Let's jump in. For our listeners who might not be familiar with TietoEVRY, can you give us a bit of an overview about what the company does?

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Yes. Sure. We are a company based in the Nordics, like very, very far away from sunny Australia. We are a tech company. We provide different solutions. For instance, in software, cloud and infra and also business consulting. I think nowadays, we are the biggest tech provider in the Nordic, at least.

Caitlin Mackie:

Sustainability is a huge part of TietoEVRY. You really have a robust sustainability game plan and your strategy for 2023, which highlights your key priorities for ethical conduct, climate actions and creating an exciting place to work for your employees. Can you elaborate on the sustainability game plan for 2023?

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Yeah, we would love to. The sustainability game plan is our long term plan that we created last year. We were actually two companies merging into one last year. We had different legacies. X Tieto were good at some things and X EVRY were good at some things, but of course, we had lots of challenges too. We had to sit down and really try to find out what should be our focus going forward and not only actually to build upon what we already have, but also look at the major challenges out there to see like, where do we want to be and what role do we want to have? We created a game plan that is two-folded. We have like the responsible operations that is the traditional sustainability work that you would find at any organization that takes sustainability seriously.

We have the ethical conduct where we have business, ethics, and the corruption, cyber security, privacy, human rights, responsible sourcing, for instance. Then, we have exciting place to work, which is more like HR related because we're people companies, we have to be very good at this in order to attract the right talent and also to keep the talent that we have. We have major challenges when it comes to bringing in and keeping women in our sector, for instance, so we have to be very good at diversity and inclusion and also employee experience, of course, to make this a fun place to work at. Then, of course, climate action may be the one thing that people think about most when they think about sustainability due to the emerging climate crisis. We work a lot with that, of course, and also circular economy and our take on that.

That is like the foundation for us that we have to be very good at like our license to operate, and we work throughout the value chain with these topics, but then because we are a tech company, we also wanted to see what can we do to not only improve our own sustainability performance, but foremost our customers? What's due, I think, and what really stands out for TietoEVRY now is that we have this really, really strong business focus going forward for this sustainability game plan. I was thinking maybe Ulrika could take over and explain and elaborate a little bit about the upper half of the circle.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Yeah, exactly. What we identified when we were developing this strategy or long term plan was that some of our biggest impacts also actually resides among our customers. We have a lot of capabilities and we have a lot of customers, so why not combine those and see where do we have the biggest opportunity in terms of actually helping our customers to become more sustainable? We developed a methodology where we investigated our capabilities, our customer pain points, our customer opportunities and landed in four broad impact opportunities. That's where we have business opportunities in making our customers sustainable. Those are new focus areas within our sustainability long term plan, where we engage with our own business to drive these areas and develop together with our customers to create positive impact on people, planet and societies.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

I think also if I may add to that, Ulrika, so we set the plan to do that, and we had of course, a lot to build upon. We had lots of good reference cases, but of course, we needed to pin it down to get the buy-in from management. Also, of course, get the resourcing. We started with identifying those areas where we think that other people have, or other customers or stakeholders have impact opportunities, which means a business opportunity for us. We must not forget that, but in order to actually deliver in a good way and at the speed that our customers require, we also had to create a consultancy team that could help in the delivery organization because the customer requirements become... The pressure was so high.

For our little team group sustainability, we couldn't really handle everything, so we created something that we call the sustainability hit team, which is a consulting team consisting of consultants that knows data and sustainability within business consulting. Ulrika, you have been given also... You have the role of leading this group, perhaps you would like to say something more about that group?

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Well, this is a group of people that, just as Ida said, they have this kind of expertise, combining sustainability knowledge with IT and technology. We work together to identify both ongoing projects that might be related to sustainability in one way or the other that we perhaps can scale and create synergies, but we also work to identify new opportunities, having our ears towards the ground and listening into what do the customers actually want to have. Then, we take in these opportunities and try to see how we can develop them to actually support our customers. Hopefully, this team will just continue to grow and us with our other efforts, become very integrated in all our business operations. That is at least our aim, so the responsibility lies where the responsibility is sort to say.

Rebecca Griffith:

That's wonderful. Now, I think you've kind of touched on this in a broader sense, but in the TietoEVRY annual report, you talk about implementation of sustainability into daily business operations. What are some other key ways that you're doing this?

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Yeah. If I can start, Ida?

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Sure.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

I think one of the most important things is to involve everyone from the beginning in what we actually should focus on and what are the most important topics in terms of sustainability, both for all our stakeholders, but also for our business, so that we actually give the ownership of sustainability to the organization. Not so that they feel it comes from the side or from above, but it's actually something that is relevant and that the organization owns. That means that each and everyone has the responsibility to also contribute to our joint targets that we also have involved the different business leaders and parts of the organization in setting. I think that ownership is a keyword here to actually enable integration of sustainability in the operations. Ida, do you agree?

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Yeah. No, but the group sustainability, our group, we are a small team consisting of specialists with long experience, but we are only so many, so we have to have a very integrated way of working in order to make this fly. What we've been focusing on a lot since many years back is to get it integrated. For instance, if we look at responsible sourcing, which is crucial how we handle our supply chain. We work closely together with a chief procurement officer. The sustainability goals that we have that are public and that we disclose every year in our annual report is just as much his goals as it is our goals, so we really get some power behind driving it and we get the results that we need in order to move forward. That is one thing. Then, as Ulrika explained earlier in the last question about the sustainability hit team, how we also now have taken this step further to really approach the business in a more structured way that we have done before. As I said, we had very good reference cases and we have a portfolio of sustainability related services, but now we're doing this in a much more structured manner because of the market, the demands that has increased so much.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. That's great. I think what you mentioned, having that structure helps with that company buy in and getting everybody on board and realizing that it's everybody's commitment and it's like a journey you're all on together. Yeah. I think that's great. Something that's often talked about is the overlap between business and sustainability and the role of the business in addressing some of the major challenges we face as a society. I think so many look to clearly distinguish their responsibility and draw a line somewhere, but I'm not so sure that's the right approach. TietoEVRY certainly recognizes they have an important role to play and really pave the way towards carbon neutrality. What's your approach to this?

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Okay. First of all, I think there must be an overlap or there must be like, if you are a company like we are, we cannot do things that we don't think also is good for us, like financially long term. That is the beauty of sustainability. If you have good and long term targets, it's also support the growth of the company in financial terms, so we always have both those perspectives in mind, creating strategies going forward. For us, we work both for our own operations when it comes to climate change to decrease our carbon footprint, obviously, so we are changing. We have renewable energy in all our data centers and offices. We are now currently at 80% and approaching 100. It's going to be difficult. The last percent is always the most difficult ones, but we have a good development as for now.Then, of course, we work super hard because this is the, I think number one question that our customers is asking for, ways to manage their own carbon footprints. Here we are strong in data, of course. Do you want to add something around that?

Caitlin Mackie:

No, but I think that the first reflection that you had that we have this financial perspective also when developing the sustainability plan, it's important because I think that what we see is that... Our business is doing business. Yes, of course. But if you don't do it right, there will be no business on a dead planet, right? So that you have to have the long term perspective where you take into account all the different aspects. It's not only the financial, because they're also interlinked. I think that also the risks that are connected to, for example, climate change for business operations, so the inbound risks that the surrounding is posing to us are becoming more and more clear. I think that it's also becoming evident that if you don't have sustainability integrated in your operations, you will no longer have a license to operate in 2021 and beyond. I think it's just a smarter way of doing business, to be honest.

Rebecca Griffith:

We can all acknowledge that climate action is one of the biggest global challenges for our generation. In recognizing that this is one of your key priorities to address, how do we take these challenges and frame them in a way of opportunity?

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Well, this is the beauty of being a tech company. We have the luxury of not having lots of goods that we need to take care of cotton or food or so, so we can go straight to the point, I think, and start to listen to what our customers need and create services and solutions that support them in their journey to decrease their carbon footprint. It sounds very easy when I say it like this. It's not that easy, of course. It requires a lot of hard work and everything, but that's what we should do. I think that when you look at the crisis that is emerging, the tech industry is also seen by the other industries as the great enablers. I think that we have a key role to play. I think that we have a responsibility to our stakeholders to be there and to be in the forefront.

I think that's what we've been doing. For instance, for the last year, the guest team has been working on a very interesting solution called the sustainability hub, which actually addresses this spot on. Would you like to...

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. I totally agree with you, Ida. The tech industry, it's really an enabler and that also means that there's a lot of business opportunities. As you said, the sustainability data hub voice, one of our responses to these kind of business opportunities that we see out there, so what happened was that we were sitting and discussing and realized that one of the biggest obstacles for companies to actually integrate sustainability into decision making, into risk management analysis, et cetera, is the lack of data as you have now produced your own ability report, the big hurdles that comes with actually collecting the data for that report, it sits in shattered data sources.

The collection is often manual. The data might not be in the right shape. Most companies actually collect the non-financial data once a year for their annual sustainability report. That means that when you have that data, you are actually steering through the rear view mirror because you are not steering proactively by taking fresh data into account when you take your decisions or plan your operations. What we did was that we started to develop a solutions, which builds on automating the data collection of sustainability data by helping customers to identify where does the data sit? How can we actually automate it? Is it via automation, via IoT solution? Who will use the data? Which KPIs and metrics do we want to map it against? How often do we want the data to be updated? Then, visualize it in real time? A modern way of an ERP system for ESG data, you could say, so that it is actually possible to equate non-financial inform and with financial information.

That should give the opportunity for companies to treat the data in the same manner and actually integrate sustainability into the decisions that they take. For example, let's think about the impact of us going from working at the offices to now working hybrid. What are the actual impacts? Can we see that the sick leave has increased or decreased? How has the carbon emission been impacted by us not traveling back and forth to the offices? If we have that data, we could also use that to decide whether we should continue with hybrid working, or if we should force our employees to come back to the office, or if everybody should be working from home. If you can get hand of that collective view of the activities that you take, you could also make more holistic and informed decisions. That's one response kind of how we try to treat sustainability as a business opportunity and identify which are the pain points that our customers have in terms of co-creating a sustainable future, and where can we tap in into that? That is the kind of beauty, as you said, our industry.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

It is.

Rebecca Griffith:

Really interesting looking at it in real time, as you said, as opposed to a retrospective assessment of the data, which really, you can't change.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Exactly. Yeah.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Yeah.

Rebecca Griffith:

What's the point in waiting another 12 months to then look at it again when you have completely done [crosstalk 00:18:32]?

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Yeah. Both sustainability.... Yeah. Sorry. Both sustainability and tech is moving extremely fast. I think we need to work like this. I think customers are going to require... We see more and more before they wanted us to report once a year, but now so many of our customers, they want us to report different types of data related to the solutions or our delivery to them on a quarter basis. The more we can have real time data, I think it's going to be the new normal very soon.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Me too. That will be a huge game changer for companies. When the data is there, you can get it black on white. There is no excuse for taking bad decisions, right?

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. Yeah.

Rebecca Griffith:

Quite exciting.

Caitlin Mackie:

Exactly. I don't know about you, Beck, but I'm definitely sitting here being like, "Wow," at all, like this would've been super handy 12 months ago.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Yeah.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

It's out there. Yeah.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Yeah.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

It's on the market, so you're more than welcome.

Caitlin Mackie:

All right.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

I think that's also typical from sustainability that you have to understand that the solutions to all of these kind of complex problems, they can't be solved by any actor. We need to work in ecosystems and everybody will have to bring their expertise to the table. Then, we can get things to actually be solved. I hope that that logic will also impact other areas so that we more try to cooperate instead of having the cake ourselves, because then there will be no cake left over. That would be sad.

Caitlin Mackie:

It's so, so refreshing to hear you say that. I think for so long businesses have always had this idea about, "Oh, competition," and like, "Keep what's yours. Keep it to yourself. We're going to succeed in this area." But moving into this space, it's just not about that anymore. It's about how we can collaborate together to reach those solutions. I think that's so powerful.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

For sure. No. Sustainability is horizontal work. As an organization, as an entity, as a company, we are not stronger than our closest stakeholders anyway. Our performance is very much reliant on their performance.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

I think it's so interesting also because since we come from that kind of background, Ida and I also always working across all silos, across all kind of company functions. We also get a special role in our company because we don't have the legacy of working in silos, so we just totally break them all the time because we're not aware of them. That's just what is needed to be able to get the job done. I think that it's really interesting to see how the organization actually appreciates that.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Yes. Sometimes, they don't.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Sometimes, they don't. Exactly. Sometimes, they don't. Yeah. That's true. Yeah.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

But we have our battles internally. If you're a sustainability professional working in a big organization, you must be very prepared to have those tougher discussions as well, but we all get there, not always on time from our perspective, but that's the way it has to be. Fearless and just...

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Stubborn.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Stubborn, and don't be too bothered about silos or hierarchies or so, because then you will never get anything done.

Caitlin Mackie:

I wanted to highlight or expand on the idea of opportunity and the fact that we constantly need to be exploring new and better ways of doing things so that we can move forward. It would be great to get your thoughts on the role of technology in advancing sustainability. I know you've touched on it, but it'd be great to elaborate.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

If I start, then you can build on it.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Sure.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

I think that some of the business opportunities or the solutions that we can develop are cross industrial. For example, the need for data and the need to get hold of it and to visualize it and to be able to act on it, is of course, something that all companies in all industries could make use of. But then, I think that for many solution, they are industry specific. For example, logistic. They need certain solutions to be able to optimize their logistic, their rooting, or to better pack their lorries and trains, et cetera. But I think that... There are both this industry specific solution and this cross sectional business opportunities stuff that you have, and also one of the hidden gems within the IT sector is the side effects of digitalizing services or solutions.

It's also important to understand that even though a solution might not be developed and deployed for the use of mitigating or climate change, for example, the actual impact of its implementation might lead to less carbon emission. Let's think about we have a solution that is called patient engagement. It means that you could engage with your doctors and nurses over your phone, which means that you don't have to take the public transportation or your own car to the hospital or to the medical clinic, which of course saves that transportation and in turn, saves carbon emissions if you travel with something except for an electric car. Many of the digital solutions actually have that positive hand print impact or effect, I would say. Of course, the opportunity of expanding on those is also massive and to identify them, perhaps it's the possibility. If you have a patient engagement app, could you use it for other purposes for other users to increase the impact.

Rebecca Griffith:

At Easy Agile, one of our goals was to establish a baseline and publish our very first sustainability and diversity report, which I believe we've shared with you. We'll also share that report as well as the TietoEVRY annual report in the show notes for our listeners. But what advice would you give to organizations to ensure that these kind of documents don't turn into a stagnant document or a mere check of the box exercise? How do we use these reports to encourage conversation and continually seek ways to improve?

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Okay. I get so many thoughts now. First of all, keep up with an upcoming frameworks. Don't get stuck in all the good old GRI for instance. In the European Union, so we are now approaching the taxonomy reporting or TCFD or so on. Go for those new ones. Also, of course, everybody has to do the ground work. You have to do your stakeholder engagement, the dialogues, the materiality analysis in order to know that you focus on the right things and so on, and you have to have really concrete goals and action plans and KPIs and everything, so you can measure your performance against the goals that ultimately what sustainability reporting is about. But then, I think the opportunity with reporting, because reporting can be a little bit boring too, in a sense, and it can feel stagnant in a way. It is that it's such an important tool in the strategy work.

This is where you get the attention from the leaders like, "What goals are we going to have and how did we do and so on?" That's where you can have the good discussions or you can also raise the ambition level as you go along. That I think is really crucial. Use it as a strategy tool as well, and then never get stuck in like, "Oh, yeah. It's good. We met our targets. We moved 3% forward or whatever." Don't think so much about that. Think about lie what are the major challenges right now? What is your role as an organization? No matter what organization you are, find your way to be part of the solution instead. We have that discussion sometimes internally. People are like, "Oh, but you're doing so good. You have a good results and so on."

But for me and Ulrika and our sustainability professionals, we're like, "Yeah. Okay. We move forward. That's good." But from a greater perspective where we are reaching the tipping point for the planet, so we feel other pressure in order to move forward faster. Don't end up in like, "Yeah. We move forward. We're keeping the pace." Full on power ahead, and speed is of essence going forward.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

Yeah. No, I fully agree. I think that's really good reflections to hook the sustainability reporting up on the challenges to understand. What are the purposes? What are we actually trying to achieve by this report? We are trying to contribute to minimize the negative impact and to increase the positive impact, and the sustainability report is a tool for that. I think another thing that is really important is to actually also engage with the organization to get them define their own targets and their own metrics to report on, so that they feel ownership. For some of the areas that we have in our sustainability report, when we have an engaged partner within the organization that themselves have ideas on targets, we develop their own KPIs.

They feel that, "I really believe in this. I want to work with this." Then, the follow up and the continuous reporting is much easier than while we have perhaps other parts of the organization where there isn't so much clear targets internally, so that the sustainability report is more felt like something that is done on an annual basis just collecting the data, but not making use of it actually. Just create that commitment and build on the company's own targets and own KPIs that are useful. Then, of course, sometimes if you do report according to a sustainability framework such as the GRI standards, which is commonly used in Europe, then you, of course, need to report according to some of the metrics in that standard, but then add your own key guides, your own metrics, because that will make the organization feel engaged, I could say.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Yeah. Yeah. Basically to summarize that, so three things, do the groundwork according to the upcoming and fresh frameworks, and then two, use it as a strategic tool to have those important discussions with management and make it a part of the overall strategy, so you don't end up with the sustainability strategy and an overall strategy. Then, three, be bold. Look at the challenges and not only what's doable or keeping the trend or whatever. Those three things, I think is important to have in mind.

Rebecca Griffith:

Spot on.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. I love that. I think that's great advice, especially the idea of you're mapping out what you're doing internally and what that looks like, but being able to take that step back and say, "Okay. But what does this contribute to in the big picture? What are we actually helping and what are we doing to move in the right direction?" Something that I often think about is things like the UN sustainable development goals and looking at those and being like, "Well, what can we do to of map where we are at and where can we offer? What can we be doing in this space that helps reach those targets?" Yeah. Great advice. I love it. But I think just to wrap us up, our last question for both of you is looking forward, what keeps you hopeful?

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

It keeps me hopeful. Well...

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

For me, I think the younger generation, to be honest. I think that seeing my brothers' daughters that are teenagers, or to see [inaudible 00:31:19] and the commitment that she's able to steer up, I think that gives me hope that things will move faster in the future. I think that's positive.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Yeah. I also second that. I think I visited the school last week with students like 18, 19 years old, and I've been doing that every year for a couple of years now and I always ask them, "What do you know about sustainable? What do you think about it?" Before, it was like, "Yeah. The environment or recycling maybe," but now they were like, "Yeah. The UN SDGs..." So the level of knowledge has increased so much. There is huge interest and when I gave them, "What can you do on a practical level if you want to live a more sustainable life?" They were like, "Yeah. Don't buy a new party cup for the Friday night. Borrow from your friends, or there are these sites. I can text you these sites where you can borrow dresses and stuff like that." They are doing it in real life in such a good way where they combine technology and sustainability, so they're much more tech savvy than we are. I was very inspired by that.

Ulrika Lagerqvist Von Unge:

They're also willing to actually sacrifice stuff. It's like, "No, we don't fly. We don't do this because we would like to have a future to live in." I think that that is something which we are so comfortable and so used to having a certain lifestyle, but they are perhaps not and they are challenging that lifestyle that we have been having, which has also led to where we are today.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

I think also to add to that, I think that finally the leaders of our countries are getting it, at least getting close to getting it. I think things are changing, so that's good, but my hope stands to the young ones still.

Rebecca Griffith:

It's nice to feel that it's becoming a normal part of consciousness for the newer generations where it's something that we had to learn to appreciate and respect and to take action on, but it seems to be a part of their upbringing and a way of life now, which is great.

Caitlin Mackie:

Well, I think that's great. I think it's great to leave the episode on such a high and leave the audience with a bit of inspiration moving forward. Thank you both for taking the time to chat with us and sharing your expertise with the Easy Agile audience.

Ida Bohman Steenberg:

Thank you so much for having us. It was fun to talk to you, and it's nice also to talk about the perspectives from the Nordics and from the tech industry. Thank you very much.

Rebecca Griffith:

Thank you.

"Really enjoyed my conversation with William and Riz, I'm looking forward to implementing their recommendations with our team" - Angad Sethi

In this epsiode I spoke with William Rojas and Rizwan Hasan from Adaptavist about the ways we can enable high performing agile teams:

• The significance of team alignment
• When and where you should be using tools to assist with your team objectives
• Prioritizing what conversations you need to be apart of
• Advice for remote teams

Subscribe/Listen on your favorite podcasting app.

Thanks William & Rizwan!

Transcript

Angad Sethi:

Good afternoon/evening/morning everyone. How you guys going?

Rizwan Hasan:

Oh, good. Thanks Angad.

William Rojas:

Yeah. How are you?

Angad Sethi:

Yeah, really good. Really, really stoked to be having a chat with you guys. Should we start by introducing ourselves? Riz, would you like to take it?

Rizwan Hasan:

Sure. My name's Riz Hasan, I'm based in Brussels, Belgium. Very newly based here, actually used to be based in New York, not too far from William. We usually used to work together on the same team. My role here at Adaptavist is I'm a team lead for our consulting group in EMEA. So in the European region and in the UK. So day to day for me is a lot of internal management, but also working with customers and my consultants on how our customers are scaling agile and helping them with tool problems, process problems, people problems, all the above.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Yeah. Sounds awesome.

William Rojas:

As for myself, William Rojas. I'm actually based out of a little suburban town called Trumble in Connecticut, which is about an hour plus northeast of New York, basically. And as Rez mentioned, yeah, we've worked for a number of years we've worked together, we were running a agile transformation and scaling adoption team for Adaptavist. My new role now is actually I took on a presales principle, basically a presale principle consultant these days. It's actually a new role within Adaptavist, and what we do is we have, actually all of us, I think most of us are all like ex-consultants that support the pre-sales process, and work in between the sales team, and the delivery team, and all the other teams that support our clients at Adaptavist.

Angad Sethi:

Awesome, awesome.

William Rojas:

I help find to solutions for clients and make the proposals and support them through, get them on through delivery.

Angad Sethi:

I'm Angad, I'm a software developer and I'm working on Easy Agile programs and Easy Agile roadmaps, two of the products we offer for the Atlassian marketplace. We're super excited to speak to you guys about how your teams are operating in, like what's a day to day. Riz, would you like to answer that?

Rizwan Hasan:

Sure. Yeah. So apart from like the internal management stuff, I think what's particular to this conversation is how we walk clients through how to navigate planning at scale, right?

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

I'm working with a client right now who's based in the states, but they're acquiring other software companies left and right. Which I think is also a trend that's happening within this SaaS ecosystem. And when that happens, they're trying to bring all that work in together. So we're talking through ways of how to visualize all that in an easy way that isn't really too much upfront heavy with identifying requirements or understanding what systems we want to pull in, but more so what do you want to pull in? So really right now, in this phase of the data that I'm working with this client, it's really just those initial conversations about what are you planning? What are you doing? What's important to you? So it's a lot of these conversations about that.

Angad Sethi:

And so you mentioned it's a lot of internal management. Are some of your clients fellow workmates, or are they external clients?

Rizwan Hasan:

They're mostly internal because I manage a team, so I have different people who are working on different types of projects where they might be doing cloud migrations. They might be doing some scripting work. In terms of services, we cover everything within the Atlassian ecosystem, whether it be business related, process related, tool related. So it's a big mix of stuff at all times.

Angad Sethi:

Cool. And is it usually like you're speaking to all the team leads, and giving them advice on agile ceremonies, and pushing work through pipelines and stuff?

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah, actually, so a story of when I first moved to Brussels, because we've... So professional services started at Adaptavist in the UK, and this was maybe like seven-eight years ago, and it's expanded and myself and William were part of like the first group of consultants who were in North America. That expanded really quickly, and now that we're in EMEA, it's almost like a different entity. It's a different way of working, and a lot of leadership has moved over to North America, so there's new systems and processes and ceremonies and then all that's happening. But because of time zones there's a conflict.

So what I started to do when we got here was to reintroduce some of those habits and consistent conversations to have, to really be much more on a better planning cadence. So interacting with people who would be, say, bringing work to delivery in presale. So folks who are, who work similar to William's capacity over here in this region, and then also project managers who would be responsible for managing that work. Right? So on the equivalent of like a scrum master on an engagement or like an RTE on a big engagement. Right?

Angad Sethi:

Yep. Yep. That's awesome. Just one thing I really liked was your terminology. You used conversations over ceremonies or speaks about the agile mindset in that sense, where you're not just pushing ceremonies on teams, where you actually embody being agile. Well, I'm assuming you are from your conversation, but I guess we'll unpack that. What about you, William? What's your [crosstalk 00:06:32]

William Rojas:

I was going to say, one of the things that's interesting challenge that we face, because Adaptavist has an entire branch that does product development and there are product developers, and product managers, and product marketing, and all sorts of things like that. And they set plans and they focus, deliver and so forth, as you would expect a normal product organization to do. On the consulting side, one of the things that's very interesting is that a lot of our, like we have to answer to two bosses, right? Like our clients come in and say, "Hey, we need this," and we have to support them. In the meantime, we have a lot of internal projects, internal procedures and processes and things that we want do as a company, as a practice, but at the same time, we still need to answer to our clients.

Angad Sethi:

I see.

William Rojas:

So that's actually one of the interesting challenges that from an agile perspective, we're constantly facing having to balance out between sometimes conflicting priorities. And that is definitely something that, and although consulting teams at different levels face this challenge. Right?

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

So as Riz mentioned, we're constantly bringing in more work and like, "Okay, we need you to now adjust and re-plan to do something different, then manage." Yes. It's an ongoing problem that's just part of this part of this world kind of thing.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Okay. I see. And so if I heard that correctly, so it's, I guess you're constantly recommending agile processes, but you may not necessarily get to practice it?

William Rojas:

But more so we're both practicing for ourselves as well as trying to tell our clients to practice it or trying to adjust.

Angad Sethi:

I see, yeah.

William Rojas:

You know, a client comes in with needs and says, "Okay, now we have to re-plan or teach them how to do it, or re-accommodate their new emerging priorities as well." So we ultimately end up having to practice agile with and for our clients, as well as for ourselves. It's that constant rebalancing of having to weave in client needs into internal needs, and then the constant re-priority that may come as a result of that.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

And then we're constantly looking for like, how do we make this thing more efficient, more effective? How do we really be lean about how we do the work and so forth? That is definitely one thing that we practice. We try to practice that on a daily basis.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. And I guess that's a very, a tricky space to be... not a tricky space. It can be tricky, I guess, but adding to the trickiness is remote work. Do you guys have a lot of clients who have transitioned to remote work? And I don't know, has it, has it bought to light problems, which can be a good thing, or like what's your experience been?

William Rojas:

So that's interesting because so I've been doing consulting for over a couple decades, and traditionally, so I've done a lot of that, that travel warrior, every week you go travel to the client to do your work, you travel back and you do that again next week, and you do that month after month. In coming to Adaptavist, Adaptavist has historically always been a remote consulting company. So five years ago it was like, wow, we would go to clients saying like, "Okay, we need you to do this." And we're like, "Yeah, we can deliver that. And no, we don't need to, you know. We may come in and do a onsite visit to introduce ourselves, but we can deliver all this work remotely." So we've always had that history.

Angad Sethi:

Okay.

William Rojas:

But nonetheless, when COVID hit and everybody went remote, we definitely experienced a whole new set of companies were now suddenly having to work remotely, and having to establish new processes and practices that basically forced them to be remote. And I think we've had the fortune of in a sense, having always been-

Angad Sethi:

Yep, remote start.

William Rojas:

... S8's.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

I know whenever we bring on people into the company, into consulting particular, that's one of the things we always point out. Remote work is not the same as being in the office. It has its ups and downs. But we've always had that benefit. I think we've been able to assist some of our clients, like, This is how this is how it's done, this is how we do it." So we've been able to teach by example type of thing for some of the clients.

Angad Sethi:

There you go.

William Rojas:

Yeah.

Angad Sethi:

Awesome. That was actually going to be my next question is what's the working structure at Adaptavist and what sort of processes? I'm sure that it's a big company and therefore there'd be tools and processes particular to teams in themselves. Just from your experiences, what are some of the processes or tools you guys are using?

Rizwan Hasan:

So, in terms of planning and work management, because we started off as a remote first company, and since COVID, business is good. I'll be frank there, it's been good for us because we specialize in this market. We've had a huge hiring spurt in all these different areas, and one thing that I noticed internally, as well as problems that... I wouldn't say problems, but a trend that we're seeing with a lot of other clients is that because of this remote push, and the need for an enterprise to be able to give the teams the tools they need to do their work, there's a lot more flexibility in what they can use, which has pros and cons.

On the pro side, there's flexibility, the teams can work the way they want. On the con side, administration might be difficult, alignment might be difficult. So we're seeing a lot of that with customers and ours. So we're almost going on this journey with customers as we're scaling ourselves, and learning how to navigate this new reality of working in a hybrid environment.

William Rojas:

I think in terms of some of the tooling and so forth that we get to do. So we obviously internally we have, we're pretty, pretty much in Atlassian. Atlassian stack, that is very much how we work every day. All our work is using Atlassian tools. All our work is tracked, all our client work is tracked in JIRA, all our sales work, basically everything we do, we use JIRA and Confluence, we're really big on Confluence. We have a lot of customizations we've done to our instance over the years, things that we just have developed, and so that's internal.

I think the other aspect is often, depending on the client that comes to us and the type of work that we're doing for that client, then the types of tools that we use can pretty much run the full gamut. We have a lot of Atlassians, we do a lot of work in JIRA with our clients, like work in Confluence. Sometimes we're working on helping them scale, so we bring on some of the add-on to support some of the scaling practices within to support JIRA. We'll do a lot of JSM work. We do often DevOps work, and then we'll bring on a lot of the DevOps tool sets that you would expect to find, so things to support delivery pipelines.

So it really depends quite a bit on the client. We even do some agile transformation work. And then there, we do some a lot of custom build things, practices and so forth. And we bring in surveys and tools that we've been able to develop over the years to support that particularly. So a lot of the tools often are dictated by what the client and the specific engagement call for.

Angad Sethi:

In my personal experience recently with COVID, I find myself in a lot of meetings, we are experimenting with, with Async decision making. Have you experimented with Async decision making processes yet?

Rizwan Hasan:

I'll start by saying I hate meetings. I think most meetings are a waste of time, and I tell my team this. And I'm like, "If we don't need to meet, like we're not going to meet."

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Awesome.

Rizwan Hasan:

And I think that really comes. Yeah, awesome, for sure. Awesome.

Angad Sethi:

I love it.

Rizwan Hasan:

But it comes down to really is when you do meet, are you having the right conversation? And I think a key component being like an agile team, quote-unquote, is you have an understanding of what we all are doing collectively and what the priorities are. Which is tough to actually get. So when we talk about like asynchronous decision making, with a team that has some degree of understanding of what priorities are, what goals are, it gets easier. And you can have more low impact interactions with people.

So we use Slack a lot and we have a lot of internal bots on our Slack to be able to present information and collect feedback at asynchronous times, because there's voting features, there's places where you can comment. And I think when we talk about teams that are growing across the globe and also time zones and flexible working, that's a real thing now. There's a practical way of how to do that, that we're starting to dig into what does that look like?

Angad Sethi:

Do you find yourself in a million Slack groups?

Rizwan Hasan:

Yep.

Angad Sethi:

Yep. You do. Do you see any extra hurdles you've got to skip because of that? Because you maybe, do you find yourself hopping from conversation to conversation, whereas it would just be easier if everyone was in the same conversation? Does that happen a bit?

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah. Yeah. All the time.

Angad Sethi:

I hear you, yeah, there you go. Okay. Cool.

William Rojas:

But I would say we have a lot of impromptu. I think we do have a lot of impromptu meetings. And sometimes we may be in a Slack typing away. It says, you know what? [crosstalk 00:17:29]

Angad Sethi:

Just jump in a huddle.

William Rojas:

Into Zoom and then let's chat or Slack conversation, and then just face to face conversation, and then just address it then and there. But I think we have been looking at, it's almost like I think a balance between the time spent on the meeting, and the amount of people that need to be in the meeting, and the benefit and value that comes out of that meeting. And a daily meeting where work was people would pick up work or support from a sales perspective. And it was very, very much necessary as per part of the work coming into the consulting pipeline. But it felt very inefficient.

So that's one of the means, for example, we did away with, and it's now a completely asynchronous process, by which work comes in and it gets allocated, people pick it up, people support it, we deliver things, we track where things are and so forth. And we now use all of that is basically all done through Slack. So we did away with all the meetings around, "Hey, who can help with this?" But meantime, we have another meeting where we're trying to get people on projects. And that is very much a, we need to negotiate on that often. So that's a meeting that's still very much done.

Angad Sethi:

Yep.

William Rojas:

Everybody comes in, we all talk, we decide what we need to get done. People balance back and forth. So that trade off I think is really important to really understand what, there are meetings that are necessary, very valuable, and they should remain. And there's ones that really a Slack is a much better mechanism to be able to make those kind of decisions

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Very true. Yeah. And does it well, sorry, firstly, pardon the location change. I'm sitting right next to the router now, so hopefully the iPhone holds. What sort of a scale are we speaking about here in your Slack? The reason I ask is with larger organizations, it can be harder to scale. Therefore I'm just trying to get a gauge of what scale your Slack is at.

Rizwan Hasan:

So we just hit, we are just over the 500 mark, that'd be in terms of employees. With basically our general, which seems to be, I think, I don't want to say universal, but the standard across any organization that has Slack general as the best indicator of how many people you have logged on. So we're just about the 500 mark, which I would say is probably around mid-size, but it's definitely getting to the point where we're starting to see, it's almost a little bit too much in order to disseminate information, find their information, etc.

We're actually partners with Slack also. So we work with them pretty closely on some opportunities. [crosstalk 00:20:39] Yeah, exactly. And we're starting to talk with customers also about the same problem, about how much is too much, and when do you start to form communities around people that are delivering the same type of value. So those conversations are more aligned and there's not just a whole lot of chatter and people get confused, like when they read Slack and like, "Oh, is this the priority now? Or am I supposed to be doing this or change in process?" That communication is harder now, I think, really. And this is where a lot of folks, I think, who are moving to this remote environment are struggling with, is that alignment communication.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Very true.

William Rojas:

And it is, I would say fairly organic, like our channel proliferation. We do have, I would think even for company of our size, we're pretty loose about how channels get proliferated, who gets to create them, what they're for and so forth. But then it gives the flexibility of based upon your interests or the context of what you need to communicate on, then you can either join a channel that supports it or create a channel if necessary to support it. So it is, in that sense, pretty organic. But it is true that there are hundreds, if not thousands of Slack channels that we have, and so kind of staying like which one should you be on, is definitely one of our biggest challenges.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Well, that just blows my mind just because like 500 people on a Slack. Our whole company is 35 people and I'm pulling my hair out being in too many Slacks. So well A, that blows my mind.

William Rojas:

It does allow us, for example, to have client specific Slack channels. So anybody, if you need to talk about, if you're working on a particular account, you're working for a client, then there's a channel for that. And if you're working on another client, there's another channel. The thing I find helpful about it is that it gives you that context of if I want to communicate with so and so, if I communicate with Riz on a particular account, I will go to the account channel. If I want to talk to Riz one-on-one, I go to a one-on-one chat.

Angad Sethi:

I see, yep, the flexibility.

William Rojas:

So we do have that benefit of where to put the information. But it does mean that I have probably over a hundred channels in my roster of things that I follow, and I'm always behind.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

Well, yeah. So the next level of it is, then you begin to prioritize which channels should I really be notified about, and which ones are most important. I want to track those. And I try to keep that list to a minimum in terms of unread messages, and the stuff that I try to get to, and I'm bored and I have nothing else to do so, but yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

I've been leaving a lot of channels too. I've been just really cutting the cord with some channels. You know, I had some motivation to really help out here, but I just can't and it's just too much noise. And just got to cut the cord and be like, if it's empty, there's no conversation happening or if it's slow, then move on.

Angad Sethi:

Yep.

William Rojas:

We also have the ability to, you can get added back in. So sometimes you leave and then somebody will put you back in, like, "I need you to talk about this." But it is pretty organic. I know we do leave it up to the individual to decide how best to manage that.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah.

Angad Sethi:

That's awesome.

Rizwan Hasan:

We had a instance today, actually, where there was an old, it was basically a sales opportunity, a customer who had reached out to us for a certain ask, and we hadn't heard from them for months, like eight-nine months. And someone posted, someone who I'm pretty close with on our sales team posted, "Hey, this is kicking back up again, but I don't have the capacity." And I just left immediately as I saw that message. I was like, "I can't help out. Sorry."

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. The old so-and-so has left the group is a bit of a stab in the heart, but yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah.

Angad Sethi:

We will get over it. Just coming back to a point you mentioned, Riz, you said you used the words, alignment and communication. Both of you when consulting with clients, are those the two main themes you guys like to base your recommendations around?

Rizwan Hasan:

I'll give you a very consulting answer and say it depends.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

But when we engage with a customer, one of the toughest parts of our job is understanding if there is even alignment in the group of people that we're talking to as well, because at the scale of projects that sometimes we work with, we have like 20 to 25 people on a call. And of all of those people, they may have different motivations or objectives of what they're wanting with their engagement with us. So I would say, that's primarily what's driving what we're trying to find out, what we're trying to do with them is get some alignment between the group and ourselves, and communicating that is not always easy.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

Let's say, adding on what Riz, that also depends quite a bit on the specific engagement with that client. So in particular, if the engagement, because if an engagement is like, "Get me onto the cloud." Okay. You know, come in. Often there's much better alignment for something like that. If the engagements are more about, "Hey, help us scale agile, help us get better at how we deliver." Then the need for alignment, the need to make sure that we're all communicating correctly, we all understand, we all come to the meeting with the same objectives and so forth, is so much more critical.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

So in those kind of engagements, we're constantly realigning. Because it's not even like we had the alignment. It's like yeah. Okay. We have it, next week it's gone. We got to go back and get it again. So that keeping, making sure that everybody's marching towards the same set of objectives, defining what those objectives are, letting them evolve as appropriate and so forth, all that becomes so much more critical.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

And that's where the tools, that's where things like JIRA and then again, like how do we scale? How do we show what everybody's doing? And so forth, that's where it becomes that much more important. And in those kind of engagements, the tooling becomes essential. Not that the tooling's going to answer it, but the tooling becomes a way by which it helps us communicate, yeah. This is what we all agree we're going to do. Okay. The tool says so because that's the decision we've made.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

It's really interesting that you say cloud migration, William, like when you say, "Okay, I'm moving to cloud, we know what the alignment is," but even then, I'm finding is that, especially within the Atlassian ecosystem, because that's what we're exposed to all the time, but when we're moving data from a completely old infrastructure to something brand new, it's not going to be the same. And you have folks who are thinking that, "Oh, we're just going to be taking all this stuff from here and putting it over there." But what usually doesn't come along with it is that you're going to have to also change the way you work slightly. There's going to be changes that you're not accounting for.

And that's where the alignment conversation really is important because we work with small companies who understand, okay, moving to the cloud will be completely different. We also work with legacy organizations like financial institutions that have a lot of red tape, and process, and security concerns, and getting that alignment and understanding with them first of what this means to move to a completely different way of working, is also part of that conversation. So it's a constant push and pull with that.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah, yeah. It's really heartwarming to hear the two of you deal with the JCMA, which is the geo cloud migration system.

Rizwan Hasan:

Quite a bit, yeah.

Angad Sethi:

That's awesome, because yeah, that's something we are working on currently as well. So I'll end with a super hard question and I'll challenge you guys to not use the word depends in there. And the question is the number one piece of advice for remote teams practicing agile. Start with you, Riz.

Rizwan Hasan:

Get to know each other.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah, okay.

Rizwan Hasan:

Keep it personal. I think one of the hardest things about this new reality is making that connection with someone, and when you have that, that builds trust, and when you have trust, everything's a lot easier. So I'd say that. People really aren't... The enemy. That's not the right word, but work shouldn't be a conflict. It should be more of like a negotiation, and if you trust each other, it's a lot easier to do that.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

So yeah.

Angad Sethi:

That's awesome.

William Rojas:

It really is.

Angad Sethi:

I'm going to definitely take that back with me.

William Rojas:

Yeah. And just if I could quickly add to that. That's like looking for ways how to replace the standing around by the, having a cup of coffee. How do you replace that in a remote setting?

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

How do you still have that personal interaction that maybe there's an electronic medium in between, but there's still sort of that personal setting. I think that's one of the things you're looking for. Because yeah, it is very much about trust. And I think to that, I would also add, back to the alignment. Right? Because in some ways that strong interaction helps build and maintain the alignment, because often it's not so much that you get alignment is that you stay aligned.

So it is this constant, and having those interactions, having that trust and so forth, is what in a sense allows us to stay aligned. Because we know each other, we know how to help each other, we support each other, so we stay in alignment. So the trust and so forth are a good way to help build and maintain the alignment itself that you're looking for. That's absolutely. In remote world, you don't have the benefit of seeing each other, the whiteboard, all those things are not the same.

Angad Sethi:

Very true. Getting cup a coffee, yep.

William Rojas:

But we still need to stay in sync with what needs to get done. That's so important.

Angad Sethi:

Very true. And so would you guys want to drop any names of tools you're using to facilitate that trust between team members in a remote setting?

William Rojas:

So I would say, like I mentioned from my role, one of the things that we do is in the presales area, we support some of our larger accounts, almost as more of like a solution account manager, per se. So we come in and help make sure that the client is getting the solution that is meant to be delivered. So we work with the delivery teams, we work with the client, we sit in between.

There's one large client that we've been working on for years now, and we basically, to the point that they're moving towards some flavor of safe. That I wouldn't call it fully safe, but they do have a lot of safe practices, but they do PI planning, and so we come in and join the PI planning. That's actually one of the, like I said, how do you stay alive?

Angad Sethi:

That circle. Yeah. [crosstalk 00:33:15]

William Rojas:

You pull up your program definition, you look at what features you want to deliver in the PI, who's going to deliver that feature in the PI, and then in your readout, go back to the tool and say, "Look, this is what we've agreed to." Others can ask questions and so forth, and constantly going back to... For example, just last week, we're doing now sprint planning and saying, "Actually, okay, this feature's going to drag on another sprint. Let me go back and readjust in," this client is using the Easy Agile programs. The original plan of saying this features not going to be, not two sprints, but the three sprints instead, for example.

So that habit of getting into using the tool to communicate what we decided and what we just had to make changes to. So it becomes this, a communication vehicle, it's really important. Yeah, they use programs, they use the roadmap piece of programs to help them do their PI planning, and stay in sync with what it is that ultimately gets communicated out at the end of PI. And then during the sprints of the PI itself, and it's very helpful for them. Again, there's I think they have seven trainings, and they all use that to help stay in sync, stay aligned.

Angad Sethi:

Awesome. Awesome.

William Rojas:

One other quick thing I'll say is, I think there will be, some of where we've gone will now become status quo, become permanent. So I think that this has been as shift across the market, across the industry, across company, how people work. So the idea of remote work, the idea of using tooling to really establish communication, and help facilitate communication, all that, while it's been around, I think the big difference is now everybody, like you have no choice. Everybody has to do it.

Angad Sethi:

Has to. Yeah.

William Rojas:

And I think we've definitely seen a big shift across the entire industry because of that. That will now solidify and let's see what the next level brings. But I definitely think that we've reached a new stage of maturity and so forth pretty much globally, which is pretty cool.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah, it is. Thank you guys. I won't keep you too long. I think, has the sun set there, Riz? I can see the reflection going dark.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah. It is getting there. Yeah, for sure.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Yeah. I won't hold you guys for too long.

Rizwan Hasan:

All good.

Angad Sethi:

But thank you so much for the conversation. I honestly, I took a lot away from that. And yeah, I hope I can add you guys to my LinkedIn. I would love to be in touch still.

William Rojas:

Definitely.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah, sure.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Trying to establish a point of contact, not to add to one of your Slack channels, but yeah. Just so that we can be in conversation regarding the product and improving it.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah, sure. And we have a partner management channel. I know we've been talking to Haley a little bit.

Angad Sethi:

Awesome.

Rizwan Hasan:

She was reaching out, that's about some other stuff.

Angad Sethi:

Beautiful.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah, happy to. We engage with your product and it's in our white papers too, and we're going to put out another white paper this year where we're going to talk about Easy Agile too. So yeah. We'll stay in touch.

Angad Sethi:

Cool.

William Rojas:

I just gave you, so my LinkedIn is under a different, my LinkedIn is not with my work email. Because that way I can keep the same account place to place.

Angad Sethi:

Sounds good.

William Rojas:

Yeah. You can look me up on LinkedIn with that.

Angad Sethi:

Wicked awesome. Thanks guys.

William Rojas:

Awesome. All right.

Angad Sethi:

Have a good day.

"From beer analogies, to scrum in restaurants and neurodiverse teams, it's always a pleasure chatting with Kit"

Kit talks to agile methodology beyond the usual use case, like working with geologists & restaurant owners to apply scrum.

Kit also highlights the need to focus on a bottom-up approach, providing a safe space for leaders to learn & ask questions, and whether neurodiverse teams are key to effectiveness.

This was a really interesting conversation!

Be sure to subscribe, enjoy the episode 🎧

Transcript

Nick Muldoon:

G'day folks. My name's Nick Muldoon. I'm the Co Founder and Co CEO of Easy Agile, and I'm delighted to be joined today by Kit Friend from Accenture. Kit is an agile coach at Accenture and he's also the Atlassian Practice Lead there. Kit, good morning.

Kit Friend:

Morning, Nick. Sadly only the Practice Lead for a bit of things, but I try my best. It's a pleasure to be with you, for the second time we've tried this week as well, in the lovely world of broadband dependent remote working and things. But here's hoping, eh?

Nick Muldoon:

It's beautiful, isn't it? Now, for those of you at home listening in just so you've got a bit of context, Kit is a father to two, he lives in London, and he's been at Accenture now for a little over 10 years, right?

Kit Friend:

Yeah, September, 2010. Fortunately I met my wife in pretty much the same summer, so I only have to remember one year, and I can remember one by the other. So it helps when I'm trying to remember dates, and sort things through because I'm not very good with my memory, to be honest with you.

Nick Muldoon:

Oh well. So for me, the reason to get you on today, I'm super excited to hear about the journey that you've been on in Accenture, and I guess the journey that you're on with your clients, and on these various engagements. Before we dive into that though, I wanted to know, can you just tell me what is one of your favorite bands from the '90s, from the early '90s?

Kit Friend:

Yeah, and I really enjoy that we had a delay between things, because it's like one of those questions, because I'm like, "Hmm." And I think I'm a victim of playlist culture, where it's like naming an entire band feels like a real commitment. It's all about tracks now with things, right? But I have narrowed it down to two for my favorite 90s band and I think I'm going to commit afterwards. So my undisputed favorite 90s track, Common People by Pulp, right? Hands down, yeah, it's right up there. For me, I studied at St Martins, the Art College, so for me Common People is the karaoke track of my university days with things there. So Common People by Pulp, favorite track.

Kit Friend:

For bands wise though, I was split between... Initially I went Britpop, I was like, "Cool, that feels like a happy place for me." Particularly at the moment in our weird dystopian society, I listen to Britpop and it's kind of happy. So Blur was right at the top for me for band commit of the 90s thing then. But then I remembered that Placebo is actually technically a 90s band, even though I did not listen to them as a 13 year old Kit and things. So I think Placebo edges it for me on favorite 90s band of things, just about. But I do have to admit, even though it's not my favorite 90s track, I do think Wonderwall is perhaps the best song ever written.

Nick Muldoon:

Oasis? Love it.

Kit Friend:

Yeah, for track wise. But for me particularly I was at Oktoberfest with some colleagues a couple of years ago and I don't think any other track could get 600 drunken Germans up on benches together with everyone else, all the way around from the world, with a rock polka band singing at the top of your voices at 11 o'clock at night or something. So yeah, that smorgasbord, but I'll commit to Placebo for favorite band in that weird caveated sentence.

Nick Muldoon:

I love it, thanks for that, Kit. And so it's interesting because you touched on then that you went to St Martins, which was an art college. So I'm interested to know, what did you study? What are your formal qualifications and then what led you into this world of Agile delivery and continuous improvement?

Kit Friend:

Yeah. I mean to do the Twitter bio caveat that all the opinions are my own and not Accenture's before we go down the journey of things. Although it must be said I am trying to convert as many of my colleagues and clients to my way of thinking as possible. But so I studied St Martin or studied at St Martins College, so in the UK certainly, I don't know what it's like in Australia, but when you go and do an art and design degree they basically distrust your high school education. They're like, "Nah, everything you've done before is..."

Kit Friend:

So they make you take what's called, or they advise you to take what's called a foundation year where you try a bunch of stuff. So you come in thinking you're going to be a painter or a product designer or something, and they're like, "No, no, no. You haven't experienced the breadth of the creative industries and things." So I did one of those, which was amazing, and I came in thinking I was going to be a product designer. Ended up specializing in jewelry and silversmithing and things, so I made like... Yeah, sort of wearing long black trench coats and things, I was making gothy spiky armor and all sorts of things, and [inaudible 00:04:24] work with silver. So I do have a Professional Development Award in Welding from that year, so that was my first formal qualification on that. I'm a really bad welder though.

Kit Friend:

Then at the end of it I was like, "I don't really know what I want to do still." As you do as you go through university, so my formal degree title, adding to my trend of very long unpronounceable things, is, Ba Hons Art And Design And The Environment, Artifact Pathway, and what it was was... Your face is-

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, I'm trying to process that.

Kit Friend:

Yeah. I think the course only existed for three years, it felt like a bit of an experiment, or it only existed in that format. So we had architecture students doing the first part of their architectural qualification, we had what were called spatial design students who were, I think, designing spaces. They weren't interior designers, they were a bit more engineery and then we had this weird pathway called Artifact, which was the rest of us and we weren't quite as strict as product designers, we weren't artists. We were making objects and experiences and things.

Kit Friend:

Yeah, it was a really interesting experience. I mean towards the end of it I began specializing more and more in designing ways for communities to come and build things and do stuff together, and it's a bit weird when you look backwards on things. You're like, "I can directly trace the path of the things I've done since to that sort of tendency [crosstalk 00:05:54] liking bringing people together."

Nick Muldoon:

So yeah, do you think that community building aspect was kind of a genesis for what you've been trying, the community around Agile transformation you've been developing over the past decade, or?

Kit Friend:

I don't know. It's easy to trace back to these things, isn't it? But I guess I've always-

Nick Muldoon:

You don't see it at the time.

Kit Friend:

... liked bringing people together to do things. No. It's a theory anyway, isn't it? An origin story theory as we go. So I did that and then I complained lots about my course, I was like, "This is rubbish. This is all really random and things." So I got elected as a Student Union Officer, so I don't know how it works in Australia but in the UK you can be elected as a full time student politician effectively, and you can do it... You take sabbatical either during your course or at the end of your course where it's not really a sabbatical. So I was the Student Union, served full time for two years after I finished my degree, which is a bizarre but educational experience.

Kit Friend:

Again, it's about organizing people, like helping fix problems and having to be very nimble with... You don't know what's happening the next week, you're going to protest against unfair pay or you're going to have someone who's got their degree in trouble because of their personal circumstances and things, so it's a really interesting mix. So yeah, that's where I started my journey into things.

Nick Muldoon:

So it's interesting for me, because you talk about this, the early piece of that is, "We don't trust anything that you've learnt prior to this and we're going to give you a bit of a smorgasbord and a taste of many different aspects." How does that relate to an Agile transformation? Because I feel like we went through a decade there where an Agile transformation was literally, "Here's Scrum, do two weeks Scrum, story point estimates, no rollover. If you rollover we slap you on the wrists."

Nick Muldoon:

There probably, 10 years ago, there wasn't a lot of experimentation with different approaches to delivery. It was just, "We're going from this Waterfall approach to this Agile approach." Which back then was very commonly Scrum. Why don't we give people the smorgasbord and why don't we give them three month rotations where they can try a bit of Scrum and a bit of Kanban and different approaches?

Kit Friend:

Well, I guess it's practicality, isn't it? These things. It's a challenge, and it's a challenge, it works within a contained place. I teach a lot of our product container courses for our clients and we always use the David Marquet video of Greatness Summary. What's great about the David Marquet situation, he's got this Petri dish, right? Literally a submarine, aint no one interfering with his submarine crew. So he can do that, he can go, "Well, let's try this thing." I vastly oversimplify because it's an amazing story, right?

Kit Friend:

But you've got that space to do something and try something out, and actually when we do talk to clients and colleagues alike about Agile transformations, I think one of the things that I say consistently in terms of the role of leadership is they do need to create a safe space, a little place where they protect and they're like, "In this space we're doing Agile, we can experiment, we can do these things. Leave my guys alone. Trust me within that."

Kit Friend:

I think where I see Agile going well, it is where there is a bit of that safe space protected to do things. I've got colleagues who work in companies where they go like, "Okay, we're going to try now and all we're going to ask you to do is forecast your next week's volume of stories. Everything else is up to you, you can choose to apply Scrum, you can use Crystal, DSDM, whatever it is. All you have to do for us as a company is give us a high level view of these metrics or something." So there's flexibility. I think when I think about your journey as an Agilist and trying to do things though, people saying try a bit of everything, it's lovely advice but it's a bit difficult to actually do because it's like we still need to make things, we still need to do stuff practically.

Kit Friend:

So when I talk to people who are starting off their journey or both clients and colleagues who are wanting to move through things like that, like what do they do first, I still say Scrum is a really good place to start because I think there's that quote from somewhere, it's probably in the Scrum Guide, about, "It's simple to understand but complex to get right." And you would think with complex and chaotic situations, right? But I think that-

Nick Muldoon:

And the discipline required is-

Kit Friend:

Yeah, yeah. But discipline's a good thing, right?

Nick Muldoon:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). But not everyone has it.

Kit Friend:

No. But one of my colleagues, Nick Wheeler, he uses the phrase, "Too many beanbags, not enough work done to talk about Chaotic Agile." I think you've got to have that focus on getting things done, right? Value delivery has got to be there, as well as it being a pleasant working atmosphere and balance. So it's about somewhere between the two, and I like Scrum because it gives people something too... It's a framework, right? It gives people something to hang off to start their journey, otherwise I feel like you could spend months debating whether you have an Agile master and what do they do? Where do we go? Do we have a person who holds the vision and things?

Kit Friend:

I think when people are starting off I always say, like, "Why not try Scrum? Why not see? Try it for a couple of sprints and see what works for you and then see what comes out in the wash." I mean if they're in an area where there's some fundamental contradictions, like, "Yeah, I'm not going to force sprints on a call center, right? It doesn't make sense." I was talking to someone yesterday who works on a fraud team, and it's like I'm not going to ask her how much fraud is going to be committed in two weeks time, or as part of MPI, right? It's absurd.

Kit Friend:

So in those circumstances, yeah, you start with Kanban methods and processes and practices instead. But for people who are building products, building things, I think the Scrum is a pretty good fit at the beginning. So yeah, that's my answer, so both. Why not have both is the answer to that, I guess, on the way. Yeah. It'd be interesting to see what other frameworks rear their heads. I mean I found the other day a scaled Agile framework called Camelot that involved lots of castles and things in the YouTube video. I thought that was marvelous. But there's room for a lot of planning and thinking.

Nick Muldoon:

As soon as you saw Camelot, for some reason my mind goes to Monty Python. I don't know quite why. But what's this flavor of scaled Agile called Camelot? Can you tell me about it? Because I'm not familiar with it.

Kit Friend:

I've seen one YouTube video on it, Nick. For anyone Googling it, you can find it related to the X Scale Alliance. I think it's a picture of the Monty Python Camelot on the front page.

Nick Muldoon:

Is it actually?

Kit Friend:

Yeah, yeah. I'm pretty sure weird things. And you know what it's like with techy geeks, right? There's a lot of embedded Hitchhikers' Guide To The Galaxy and Monty Python references in component names and things. So I'd be unsurprised. What I like about something like the Camelot model, other than me thinking Monty Python and castles and things, is it does evoke something in people. I think when we're talking to people about Agile we do need to evoke a feeling with them. We need to get people going, "Oh yeah, I kind of get where you're going."

Kit Friend:

So I always like to do the cheesy uncapitalize the A, what does agile mean to you? Yeah, is it about being nimble? Is it about being flexible and that kind of thing?

Nick Muldoon:

I mean I'm conscious you've obviously done Lean Kanban in university, you've done Scrum Alliance Training and Certification, Prince2, Scaled Agile of course. Why do you do all these things? I mean is it curiosity? I mean is it there's an expectation from clients that you have these certifications? And would you go and get a certification in Camelot? Or even one that I was introduced to recently was Flight Level Agile, Flight Level Agility. Which is a different way of-

Kit Friend:

Ooh, another one?

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, another one. A different way of describing. Actually I remember, bit of a sidebar sorry, but Craig Smith from... who was at the time I believe was working at Suncorp, an Australian bank. He did 46 Agile methods in 40 minutes or something like that, and he spent a minute and he introduced people to all of these different approaches.

Kit Friend:

Yeah, and methods versus frameworks and things is a fun one to draw the lines between. I mean I've been surprised actually how few times I've been asked for certifications around things. It's changing a bit more, and I've seen definitely more enthusiasm from our clients, and in fact I'm seeing new people within Accenture which is really nice, to require and encourage certification. I don't think it's necessary that the safe course then guarantees that you're going to scale Agile successfully, right? But it's a good way of demarking whether people have done their homework and have put some effort into [crosstalk 00:14:50] knowledge.

Nick Muldoon:

And they got the foundational baseline stuff.

Kit Friend:

Yeah. Now in terms of your question around Brett, so my view is that if we try and attach the word coach to ourselves... I think I've seen country by country different trends, so when I look at my colleagues in the States there's a bit more codifying on the term Agile Coach. There's an attachment to ICA Agile and Lisa Adkins work and all sorts of different things over there which is good. Certainly in the UK and Europe, I see it as a lot more varied at the moment and it's a term that's attached to a lot of people.

Kit Friend:

If you look at people, just anyone on LinkedIn with a CV title or little bio title Agile Coach, you can see a big variety of people who've been doing different Agile frameworks for like 20 years doing things, and you can see someone who's been a Scrum Master for three months and then switched jobs, and they'll have like Agile Enterprise Coach as their title. And you're like, "Hmm, how many people have you ever done Scrum with? And have you done anything but Scrum?" And my view is if 40-

Nick Muldoon:

But I mean Enterprise Agile Coach because I've done Scrum with my team of six people in a-

Kit Friend:

In an Enterprise, right?

Nick Muldoon:

In Enterprise.

Kit Friend:

But my feeling is if all you can do to a team that you're coaching is offer one way of thinking and one approach to doing stuff, how are you coaching them then? There's no breadth to what you're able to offer. But if all you've experienced is Scrum and then you get landed with a team doing fraud investigation, how are you going to guide them on a path which doesn't include sprints and those things? I mean you might do, because you're going to take things from Scrum that become sensible, but you need that spectrum.

Nick Muldoon:

Give us a sense, Kit, what is the most quirky, or unusual perhaps is a better way to frame it, what is the most unusual team that you have introduced to Agile practices and Lean principles?

Kit Friend:

So I've got to embarrass my colleague Giles, because mine is not the most interesting. So Giles was looking at introducing Scrum to geologists for site surveying and things, which I love as an example to talk about because it's so-

Nick Muldoon:

Wow. Yeah.

Kit Friend:

When you unpack it's so interesting to think about what that would mean, and I need to catch up with him to see how far through they got actually applying it. But because it's like, "Why would you do that?" And then it's like, "Ooh, actually, they probably have a really big area to survey. Wouldn't it better to introduce some feedback loops and look at how you slice down that problem to get some value and learning delivery out of things?"

Nick Muldoon:

That's interesting.

Kit Friend:

So I really, really like that. Yeah. Then I always reference when we're teaching, there's a restaurant called Ricardo's in London that I have to make sure it's not gone out of business. I think it's still in business, but-

Nick Muldoon:

Well, I thought it-

Kit Friend:

Well, COVID, right? I think he's their owner, Ricardo. At least he's the person that's inspired their name. He applied Scrum and it's beautiful, looking at the exercises they went through when they put it in place. And on his website, which I'll ping you the URL for the show notes, but they do this cross functional teaming thing where they got all the staff at the restaurant to look at the role types that they needed, and then their availability and things. They were like, "Only this one guy can do the bar. Maybe we should up skill some other people to be able to work on the bar?" And I love that thinking of applying those elements of stuff.

Kit Friend:

So back to your question though of where have I applied unusual things to my teams, I haven't done any really quirky ones, to be honest with you. I mean I think having a background in art and design I find it... When I talk about iteration and all those areas, my mind immediately goes back to projects where we made things and did stuff and have it there, and particularly when people get panicked in a business situation I think back to... I used to freelance doing special effects with my dad whilst I was at university, because it's a great way to make cash for things. My dad worked for the BBC and freelance. I think about that immediacy and panic when I'm talking about Kanban and handling ops and incidents and things, and I'm like, "You guys don't need to panic, it's not like you're on live TV." And they have a countdown of three, two, one, right?

Kit Friend:

No one has that in our business. We panic sometimes when something falls over, but there's never that second by second delay. So I think the quirkiest places that I've applied Agile thinking are probably before my career in technology. They were in that kind of place where we're making creative things and doing stuff, and it's there where you're like, "You would never do a 400 line requirements document for a piece of product design or jewelry, right?" You would produce something rough and see what people think about it, and build things in so there's a balance there.

Kit Friend:

I mean when you're launching live products though, you do some strange things, right? And you have some fun memories from that. So I remember when we launched YouView in the UK, which is a public credential because it was for Accenture. Fine. But during launch day a colleague of mine, Ed Dannon and me, we became shop display people for the day so we were at the top of John Lewis in Oxford Street in London demonstrating the product, and that was a part of our Agile working for that week because that's what they needed. That was how we delivered value was physically being the people going like, "Hello, Mrs Goggins. Would you like to try this YouView box at the top of things?" So I remember those days fondly.

Nick Muldoon:

And so was that capture on a backlog somewhere, or?

Kit Friend:

Do you know what? YouView is where I was introduced to my love of dura, so I suspect, yeah, I don't think we did formally add a backlog somewhere. It would've been nice too, wouldn't it? I'd like to claim that my entire Accenture career could be constructed out of Dura tickets if I piled them one on top of each other for 10 years. Certainly about a 60%-

Nick Muldoon:

How many Dura tickets do you reckon you've resolved over the years?

Kit Friend:

God. How many have I duplicated is probably the question, right? Which is like 8,000. There's always duplicate of things. It's got to be in the thousands, hasn't it?

Nick Muldoon:

Tell me, you've, okay, over thousands of duplicates resolved. But you've been doing this for a while in the Atlassian space, and obviously with the Agile transformations at scale. How have these engagements at scale evolved over the past seven or eight years? And what do they look like in 2021 with this completely remote mode of operation?

Kit Friend:

Yeah. Starting at the end of that, I see light, I see goodness in things. But I guess similar to how you expressed 15 years ago, 10 years ago everyone was like, "Do Scrum and have some story points and things." I think during that period, if we go back like 10 years ago, so we're like the early 2010s or whatever we call the teens in the decades, I think we see a lot of people experimenting with early versions of SAFE. They'll do wheel reinvention and people simultaneously going, "Let's have a big meeting where everyone plans together. How do we normalize story points? You shouldn't, maybe we should. How do we do metrics there?" And that kind of stuff.

Kit Friend:

So I think certainly what I've seen is a lot of people trying out those things as we go through, and then trying to weave together concepts like design thinking and customer centricity, and there are all these bits of stuff which feel good, but they weren't very connected in any way that was repeatable or methodical or codified. Then what I quite enjoy, and linking back to your last question, is then the branching of the approaches to things. You've got SAFE, which is laudably to everyone who works on that, right? They try and write down everything.

Kit Friend:

I always say this to everyone, you're like, "Thank goodness someone decided to go on that website and make everything clickable and everything." Because when you do need to reference one of those elements, it's a godsend being able to go and go, "Yes, here is the page that talks about Lean budgets. I might not agree with everything on it, but it's a really good starting point. It's a really good point of reference to have."

Kit Friend:

Then you've got the others, and I do use SAFE at one end of detail, and even if you're doing SAFE correctly you don't do it by the book and copy and paste, right? And that kind of thing. But there is a lot of detail and a lot of options there. At the other end of the scale you've got things like Less, where it's intentionally about descaling and it intentionally focused on simplicity. Look at the front pages of the website, and on the SAFE website you've got everything. On the Less website it looks like we've done it on a whiteboard, right? And that's intentional, both of them are intentional at the end of the scale. Then we've got Scrum on the scale, which seems to be the new, rising, kind of darling of things at the moment, and that was the other thing. So what I see now-

Nick Muldoon:

And they all have a place, don't they?

Kit Friend:

Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

It's interesting that there's a large enough audience and market for all of these to succeed, and there's a lot of overlap between them in the various ideals and practices that they suggest that you experiment with.

Kit Friend:

Yeah. I mean what I've seen in the past few years is that I think people often get laudably enthusiastic about the scaling bit. So they take a look at a word like Lean Portfolio Management or a business problem they have of how can I capacity manage? And they go straight to the scaling frameworks without stopping at the teams on the way, and that's definitely a tendency I hear more and more from friends, colleagues, geeky friends, colleagues, clients, right? They don't make that initial investment in getting the teams going well, whether it's Scrum or whether they're running in anything else.

Nick Muldoon:

Sorry. But hang on, are you saying then, Kit, that people are actually coming into a scaled Agile transformation and they haven't got the team maturity? Sorry, forgive me, but I felt I guess my belief and my understanding was that these scaled Agile transformations, for the most part, are building on top of existing successful team transformations.

Kit Friend:

I think that is how it should work right. We should be going bottom up, or at least to a certain extent. In the SAFE implementation roadmap it talks about reaching a tipping point and having... I mean you can start with Waterfall and the SAFE implementation roadmap, but it talks about ad hoc Agile and those things there. I think when people in large businesses and organizations come with a problem though, they're coming with a big problem and they want to fix that, and yeah, it's a difficult message to land, the, "Hi, you've got one to two to five years worth of getting your teams working before you can deploy the fancy portfolio management Kanban and see a flow of things right." Because people are nice. Most people are nice, most people are enthusiastic, most people want to fix things, and so they want to fix that big scaley thing.

Kit Friend:

But it's difficult to land, the, "No, you've got to fix these things at the bottom." I was describing to a colleague, Lucy, last week, and I said, "If you want an answer a question of how do I capacity manage and how do I balance demand across a large organization, you should imagine each of your..." Let's pretend they're Scrum teams without debasing it for a moment. Let's pretend your Scrum team is like a bar with a row of different glassware on it, and each time box is a different sized pint glass or a schooner or whatever you have. Now, my capacity management for a single team is me with a big jug of beer and I've got all the work that I want to do in that beer. My whole backlog of things. My capacity management for a team is pouring it in and hopefully I guess it right. I probably don't and I spill some beer in the first ones as we go through. But over time I'm trying to guess how much beer I can pour into each time box of things and we go through.

Kit Friend:

Now, the only way that I can know how much I can fit in in the future is if I see what I've got in the past, like how it went and can I predict the size of the glass, and over time I can, and we stabilize. So everything's a pint glass after a while, after we've experimented with everything there. Now, if we don't have that ability to forecast and measure, get the actual data back via some tooling at a team level, how can we manage across multiple teams? Right? You can't. You can't have a big top down roadmap where you're like, "Yeah, we want to launch the easy Agile bank across all these areas and go into the teams." Unless you have that team level maths that you can rely on.

Kit Friend:

It doesn't matter whether that's story points or whether you're doing no estimates stuff and you're just measuring flow or you're using Monte Carlo, whatever it is. You need some mathematical way of helping people understand the flow of work and what's happening there, and ideally tying it back to value with some data. Workout whether is your easy Agile bank actually a good idea or should we pivot and do something else? Yeah, is it delivering the thing that customers want when we've given them easy Agile bank beta at the beginning of things.

Nick Muldoon:

How good do you think clients are these days? So here's the thing, I guess, you talk about early transformations and it was, "Hey, we're going to go Scrum." But now there's the design thinking, I mean there's devops, there's DevSecOps, there's so many different aspects now that people are exploring and they're exploring at the same time. How do you help the client navigate this? Because they get it from every different angle from different aspects of the business, and in fact it's just got to be overwhelming, quite frankly.

Kit Friend:

Well, it's overwhelming for us trying to help right, right? People like yourselves, I mean you're like, "How do we cope with this weird specific configuration that they want to feed into easy Agile programs?" So I think that the light at the end of the tunnel that I referenced before is I see a lot more people coming with an ask of helping them get the bottom up things right, so they understand there's a pincer. We can't ignore-

Nick Muldoon:

Get the foundation.

Kit Friend:

Yeah. But we can't ignore that there's the big business, right? There's the people expecting big things and they've drunk the Agile Kool-Aid, they've read the article and they want to be there. So there is that top down pressure, but I am seeing more and more asking for advice and help to do things at the bottom. On a couple of areas recently, my current theory of the day, and I have a favorite theory every six months or so so this won't be the same later in the year, but I really, really like training the product owners first to help with that transformation. My current theory is that it's because they're like the battering ram to help the business understand what's happening with these delivery teams, and build the bridge and link between things and form that.

Kit Friend:

Because if you don't have the product owners being the conduit and the voice of the business and the customer and the voice of the team back to the business in doing things, I think the rest of it falls down. So my theory at the moment is that if you start by training the product owners that's the best way to begin things and it helps with the scaling body scaling, the focus on the team level to help do things.

Kit Friend:

To be honest, even if they're not doing Scrum, I think that the role of a product owner, relatively close to what the Scrum guy says, if we take out the sprint references and things, I think that's a sensible thing to have in every cross functional Agile team, regardless of what you're doing. And it's a distinct personality type, right?

Kit Friend:

I often talk when people are doing our Agile Foundations course, where we're like, "Here's everything. Find your place." I think that most people, or certainly most people I train, fall quite clearly into a product owner or a Scrum Master style personality type. I'd say about 80% you can tell, like, "You're a producty person. You're a Scrum Mastery type person. Or if you're not doing Scrum, a coach, a facilitator, a team builder." Maybe about 20% can flit between the two, and they're special people. The Unicorns as we have in every industry and type, but most people fit into one of those. I think it's good to think about how those personality types work in your business.

Kit Friend:

The other thing I love about training the product owners first, it really unveils upon them that, let's say, we're now at... "Hi, Nick. Yesterday you were the business owner for this process and doing things. You're now a product owner, go. And you can only have till Monday." If we train you, you're like, "Oh my God, I didn't realize I was now accountable for the value of this whole team delivering. It's my problem to make sure they're delivering good things? I didn't know that." So if we do that training right at the beginning I think it sets a baseline of expectations of what we're asking of those people, and the responsibility that's placed on them. Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

When you're doing this Agile Foundations course that you run for folks through, are you doing a DISK profile as part of that? Again to assess their personality type.

Kit Friend:

No, no. That would be really good. What a great suggestion. I can include that.

Nick Muldoon:

Well, I'm merely inquiring because I wonder. I'm just thinking about it now, I'm wondering, are there personality types that are more likely to be the product owner? Is a product owner more of a CS and is a... Yeah, I don't know.

Kit Friend:

I don't know. I mean it's one of those things, isn't it? I forget the number of personality types and roles I've been assigned in various bits of my career. I can't remember. Back when I was a Student Union Officer, I'll have to look up the name of it, but we had the ones where, "Are you a completer finisher or a shaper?" And all sorts of those things there, and then DISk was relatively popular. We've got a Gallup Strengths Test within the Accenture Performance Management Tool, which is actually really interesting.

Kit Friend:

The bit I like about the Accenture one is when you join a new team you can bunch yourself together in the tool and see what people's different strengths and personality traits are, so you can be like, "This team's very heavy on the woo. Or you're a team that's full of energy or ideas with things, and it's quite interesting too." I mean it's nice to see the strength, but it's also interesting to notice where you might have gaps and you're like, "I need to make sure that someone's keeping an eye on quality because we all get very excited and run fast."

Nick Muldoon:

Do you remember, this would have to be a decade ago now, I'm sure, but I think his name with Larry Macaroni or Larry Macayoni, and he was working for Rally Software at the time, and he did a very wide ranging study of the effectiveness of Agile teams? And I'm just thinking back on that now, because he was looking at things like defect rates, escaped bugs versus captured bugs and all sorts of other bits and pieces. But I don't think he touched on the personality traits of these teams and whether even Dave the Cofounder here at Easy Agile, my business partner, he was talking. He shared a blog article this morning about neurodiverse teams and I'm just trying to think, do we know is there a pattern of DISK profile distribution, neurodiversity distribution, that leads to a more effective team?

Kit Friend:

I don't know. I haven't read. Yeah, it's Larry Maccherone, but it's not spelt the way I suspected originally. I put in Macaroni, based on your pasta based pronunciation of things. So it looks like it's the quantifying the... What's it called? Quantifying the Impact of Agile on Teams, which is really interesting.

Nick Muldoon:

But I don't know if that sort of study has been done since he did it back then.

Kit Friend:

Particularly the personality types is interesting, and neurodiversity is another interesting element. So I've got dyslexia and dyscalculia, and one of the bits I've found-

Nick Muldoon:

What's dyscalculia?

Kit Friend:

Well, just like dyslexia, there's quite a spectrum covered by one term of these, so it's large. But effectively my particular diagnosis, I have problems processing sequences of numbers. So you can read me out a sequence of numbers and if it's exactly that, I can cope with it normally because I can do visual processing, because that's my creative industries background, it's what we do, right? We visually process. But I can't repeat them back to you backwards, I can't reprocess them as units of stuff with things. My wife says-

Nick Muldoon:

How did you even come across that?

Kit Friend:

So a retrospective again, so my sister was diagnosed with dyslexia at school, and she's got a more traditional dyslexic diagnosis. So when you hear dyslexia, people normally associate it with not being able to read and spelling and grammar and that kind of stuff. Dyslexia, as you might know from [inaudible 00:35:00] is actually... I'm waiting for them to split it, to be honest with you, because it's so broad. But my diagnosis of dyslexia is more about my short term memory processing, so it's the ability to process. I can read and write fine.

Kit Friend:

My sister got diagnosed at school, had blue glasses, all the conventional grammar and spelling related elements of dyslexia. My dad got diagnosed then in his mid 50s, I think at the time. So he started working at the University Arts London, my art college, my dad still runs the woodwork shop in central St Martins in their beautiful new campus in King's Cross in London. He got diagnosed with things, and I was like, "Hmm. I know it's hereditary, I should probably get checked." So I think I was 25 or 26, and one of the lovely bit... I mean there's many lovely bits about working at Accenture, but a large corporation has really, really good support networks and things.

Kit Friend:

So I pinged the right people around, and they were like, "Yes, of course we can support you getting an assessment. We'd love to make sure that you're able to function." So I got an assessment done and they were like, "Yeah, you're dyslexic and dyscalculic on this kind of area." But the more interesting thing was that they were like, "Here's the coping mechanisms that you've developed." And the coping mechanisms was a list of my career and choices and education. It was like, "You will choose things where you can do abstract thinking and drawing." It was really funny because I never felt like it blocked me at school, I quite enjoyed exams and things.

Kit Friend:

But I was terrible at revising, right? I can't go through notes and do things there. Looking at my diagnosis I was like, "It's because I don't process things that way." I have to process things visually, I have to draw, I have to chunk things. Now I look at the way that I work with Agile teams and I coach teams, and I create abstract references to things, right? I'm teaching product owner and Scrum Master courses on Mural where we move things around and create objects.

Nick Muldoon:

Or the example that you used before, Kit, with the beer glasses at the bar.

Kit Friend:

Yeah. I can't deal with numbers in abstract, right? I have to deal with them in an analogy or I have to be able to visual them. I'm hopeless at coding, I can't store concepts like variables in my head. They just fall apart, it's like building with sand in front of me and it's all dry and crumbly. And I think in fact when I looked at that diagnosis and I was still, what? I'd be like three or four years into my career at Accenture. I looked at the way that I'd begun to get slowly addicted to tools like Atlassian and Dura, and I was like, "Ah, I'm compensating for the fact that I have basically no ability to memorize things in the short term." I'm helping visualize stuff in the way that I help teams and build tasks and things, in a way that means I'm outsourcing my short term memory to this lovely tool where we do things there.

Kit Friend:

Yeah. I've grown to love it, I think you have to work with it right. I speak to some of my colleagues, I teach at the moment with an Agile coach called Lucy Sudderby and another one called Charlotte Blake, and I'm like, "Thank you, guys, for compensating for my dyslexia. I appreciate that you kind of balance out my inability to memorize anything." Yeah, hopefully they feel they benefit from some of the quirky strengths of it when we go through, but it's a balancing act, right?

Nick Muldoon:

That's very cool. Thanks for sharing that.

Kit Friend:

No worries.

Nick Muldoon:

I'm just thinking about it now, as you mentioned coaching with Lucy and Charlotte, and going back to something that you said earlier, Kit, with respect to... I don't know if you said the leaders, but basically the folks at the top drinking the Kool-Aid. I'm interested to know, how do you create, going back to this other thought that you had, I'm trying to connect dots, going back to this other thought that you had right up at the top about the psychological safety, right? And that feeling safe. How do you provide a safe space for these leaders that could be CEOs of business units or execs, GMs, whatever they happen to be, provide a safe space for them to actually ask questions and do Q&A and learn without feeling?

Kit Friend:

Yeah. Because we forget that they're people too, right?

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah.

Kit Friend:

There's this idea that these leaders are somehow insurmountable, they have no fear. But we need to build a safe space for everyone around things, I think you're right. I think we get the same sort of question when people talk to me about how they can convert people to Agile or make the case for things in an organization but not sure about it. I think that the answer, relatively saying, in that we need to give them some data, some facts. So my view is that it's not good to come to people and talk about...

Kit Friend:

I somewhat cynically criticize when people talk about Agile ways of working, and they'll often abbreviate it to WAW or something as well. I think when we talk about agility too abstractedly, and I say the phrase wavy hands too much, but when we talk about it within specifics too much, it encourages a sense of anxiety and it's a nebulous, wishy washy kind of thing so I like to bring some data to people. My favorite ones to use, and I need to get updated stats, but the Sandish Chaos Reports are an amazing project management journal, where they talk about success and failure of Waterfall versus Agile projects.

Kit Friend:

Now, there's a bunch of questions it leads you to about how do they classify Agile and all sorts of things. But indisputably, what it tells you is that the traditional way of doing things that we are told is secure and safe, if I go to a procurement team or a finance team and I go, "I'd like to build this thing, guys." They're like, "Great, give me the milestones, give me the plan." And there's this inbuilt assumption that that's a safe and responsible and proven way to do things.

Kit Friend:

The Sandish Chaos Reports tell you it's a terrible way to do things, right? They're like, "Statistically, doesn't matter what you're building, what industry, what you're doing, it's a terrible idea to fix scope at the beginning, trust your plan and have a system which fails when you have any change." And when you unpack it, like when we talk about agility overall, what are we saying? We're saying it's not a good idea to begin something and for it only to be able to succeed within fairly tight boundaries, where no one changes their mind for the duration of the thing, everything goes exactly as you plan and when does that ever happen with technology? And the world doesn't change for the duration of your thing.

Kit Friend:

Most of the time when we're talking about these project things, like how long are they? Three months to three years is the window I usually give. Three months, I see rarely in any industry these days, right? These big efforts where people are trying to do these things at scale, you're talking multiyear. What are the chances that the scope can be frozen for that period? Pretty low, and also what's the chance that the people that you asked for the requirements at the beginning really knew them all? Everyone's normally really nice, they try their best.

Nick Muldoon:

The chance that the people you ask at the beginning are going to be there when you actually get to the next-

Kit Friend:

Yeah. There's a whole set of fundamental problems with that. So I like to bring that kind of data to our leaders when they're asking about the case for agility, so it's not about, "Do you want to sign up to use a framework?"

Nick Muldoon:

But let's say, Kit, that they've made the case for agility, they're there, they're doing it. What's the space that you provide for them? Do you have a CEO round table where they can go and they've got a shoulder to cry on and go, "This Agile transformation is going harder than I thought it was going to be"?

Kit Friend:

Agilists Anonymous, [crosstalk 00:42:19] company. Yeah. I think it is a good idea to pair them up, so I get a lot of requests at the moment for us to provide coaches directly to support leaders. I've also seen a trend in reverse mentoring, separately big companies. But that kind of idea of, okay, you've got these people who are really experienced, and their experience is relevant, right? We're not saying that the CEO's 30, 40, 50 year career in something is invalid now and we know better than them. But they're trying to match that up with these, not even emerging, right? Because the Agile Manifest is 20 years old now. But they're trying to match these up with these foreign, new practices and things they've got, and that requires a bit of hand holding. So yes, there's a personal angle there. I don't think necessarily a round table is the way to do it per se, but giving them someone that they can chat too and, yeah, an ability to relate and go like, "What is this thing?" And decode the jog, I think is really useful.

Kit Friend:

So data about success rates is important, right? But the other data that's really important I think to help provide that sense of safety is about value delivery, and this is where I think most people are still having trouble. We've just about got to the point where people can start to attach a concept of benefits and value at the start of things. Now, often that's still too big. We talk about the value of the entire project, can you assign a notion of value to every epic and story in your backlog or whatever units of stuff you're doing?" Probably not, right? Can you do it in a pound or dollar or euro or whatever your local currency is figure? Probably not. But can you even rank them one to 10? Maybe with things.

Kit Friend:

So I think the evolution of OKRs and KPIs coming in, and people starting to internalize that more, offers some hope. It's still relatively immature in most organizations and you're still kind of getting there. I feel like every sort of practice and things, it's probably going to have some misinterpretation, enthusiastic and well meaning interpretation, but you're going to get some people using it somehow to Waterfall things probably in some areas. But bringing that data that gives them some sort of feedback loop that makes sense to those people in those senior positions I think is really powerful. The opposite of this is where they expect to see RAG statuses and milestones and that's the only data they get from their teams, right?

Kit Friend:

I sat down with an executive of an organization a few years ago and I was like, "Please invest in your tooling. Please do it." And he's like, "Why would I need to? I have these slides where they tell me green and the dates are there." And I was like, "I love that you're trusting, and I like to trust." The trust in the teams was really, really good. But I knew the teams and I knew they didn't have any tools. It was project managers getting stressed and running around, and then I knew that all the RAG statuses were going to go, "Green, green, green, green. Red." It was the Watermelon Effect that was going to happen, right?

Kit Friend:

So when I see conversations like that happening, I want to empower them. I want to empower them with data and bring those things together. I think that data about why doing Agile is really important, the data about how it's really going on your teams, and the ability to make decisions based on it is really important. There's the Scrumming case study on the Saab Gripen is lovely because they, in one of the articulations, they do the sequence of morning standups and allegedly, according to the case study, I'm pretty sure it's true, they do 7:30 in the morning, which is insane. I don't know why they start at 7:30 in the morning in Sweden, but apparently they start at 7:30 in the morning. But they do a sequence of standups and the idea is by the end of the hour the cascade of standups means that any impediment can reach the executives within the hour and they can fix it.

Kit Friend:

That feeling of connection, that trust in teams and that show of progress, real working things being the way that we communicate that we're making progress, I think that's how we build some safety in and help our leaders do things. Not RAG statuses and milestones and Gantt Charts. They have to have that realness with things, hopefully.

Nick Muldoon:

It's interesting. It makes me think, we did a factory tour recently and it's a factory that makes air conditioning manifolds for commercial buildings, and they actually-

Kit Friend:

What? Why were you touring an air conditioning factory? Were you buying some air conditioning?

Nick Muldoon:

No, no, no. Lean principles, right? You want to see the application of the principle.

Kit Friend:

Wow, you're living it, you're living it. It's wonderful.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. So they do breakfast from 6:15 to 6:45 or 6:30, something like that, and then they get going. I think they do their standup at 7:45 after they're actually in the flow, they come together, "Okay, where are we at for today? What are we working on?" Then that rolls up to the ops team and then that rolls up to the leadership team, and then at the end of the day they do their closing huddle for the day, "Hey, have we got all of our tools? Are we back? What are we going on with tomorrow morning?" So it was like the start and the finish of the day and it's really interesting.

Nick Muldoon:

Just thinking about, we introduced an end of day huddle in COVID, when we were all on Zoom all the time, and I think it was very useful. But then of course as we get back into the office, it drops away. It's interesting how things evolved, right?

Kit Friend:

Yeah. And you're the big Head Honcho, right, Nick? I have a worry niggle with end of day meetings, about whether they're for the team they're for people to feel they're across stuff, and I find it interesting because I'm having to take people through practicing for Scrum Master exams and things, lots at the moment, and I really like talking about how standups are for the team. They're for the developers, they're not for the product owner even, they're certainly not for the stakeholders. Now, I consistently see with a lot of these Agile ceremonies, I'm like, "Who's getting the benefit from that meeting? Is it someone getting a status check in or is the team getting it?"

Kit Friend:

And if the team enjoys it, if the team gets something from the end of day huddle and things, I'm cool with it. But sometimes I see things, and the two anti patterns I see with leaders joining, of any level, joining the meeting, so the first is that they use it as like their aeration platform. The team's ready to go with their standup and then the leader of whatever level pops in and he's like, "Team, I've got this update for you." And then it's like 10 minutes of their amazing update and mini vision for the day, and then at the end it's like people are going, "Yeah, now do your standup. Now do the Scrum kind of thing." And then the other thing is that where it becomes like a status check in for stuff, and I'm like, "It's not what it's for, guys. We should be focused on [crosstalk 00:48:57]-"

Nick Muldoon:

We do. So we can get done with 22 people in six to eight minutes.

Kit Friend:

That's slick.

Nick Muldoon:

It's taken time to get here, but what we actually started out asking for was one good thing, and that's typically a family, community thing, what are you going on with today, do you have any blockers? And it's interesting now that we're having this chat, Kit, I do not see blockers come up very often, so I wonder why that is.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, anyway. Hey, Kit, I'm conscious of time. I've got one last question for you.

Kit Friend:

Yeah, go for it.

Nick Muldoon:

What are you reading at the moment? What books are you reading or have read recently that you'd recommend for the audience to read?

Kit Friend:

Yeah, I'm between businessy books. I need to find a next one. One attribute, and it's probably not my dyslexia, I think it's just because I'm lazy, I'm really bad at reading business books, like serious books with things. So I rely on audiobooks lots to consume meaningful data. I really, really enjoyed listening to Lisa Adkins Coaching Agile Teams audiobook when she released it, because I knew I wasn't going to get through the book and so-

Nick Muldoon:

Did she narrate it?

Kit Friend:

Yeah, which is even better, right?

Nick Muldoon:

Cool, yeah.

Kit Friend:

So lovely to hear from the authors' voices when they're doing things. So I'd really recommend that, and then accompanying it after... I mean either way round, listen to the Women In Agile podcast series on coaching Agile teams, because they talk about each other and there's a whole episode on language, and she talks about how between writing the book and narrating the book, reading it, there was bits of language where she just cringed and she was like, "I can't believe I wrote that." And it really resonates it with me, thinking about my Agile journey and how I would cringe at what I did with teams five, six years ago. As we all do, right? You look back with hindsight.

Kit Friend:

So Coaching Agile Teams is really, really good, and I'd recommend. When [crosstalk 00:50:54]-

Nick Muldoon:

Isn't that beautiful, right? Because if you look back and you cringe, it shows that you've evolved and adapted and you've learned, and you've improved?

Kit Friend:

Oh yeah, if you look back and don't cringe, either you were perfect which is unlikely, right?

Nick Muldoon:

Unlikely. Unlikely.

Kit Friend:

[crosstalk 00:51:07] things, or you're oblivious which is more likely. I don't mean you personally, Nick. So Coaching Agile Teams is really good, I still recommend the Whole Time if people are trying to get their head round what it's like to work in Agile, what's there. I used to recommend The Phoenix Project, and then I really enjoyed The Unicorn Project more for filling in a team. Your talking about the air conditioning factory just reminded me because of all the Lean kind of things. I really like that, and I struggle when I explain to people because I'm like, "It's not dry, it's a novel about an Agile transformation, but it's not [crosstalk 00:51:42]

Nick Muldoon:

It's not. I love it. I get up and I read the newspaper, right?

Kit Friend:

Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

That's my thing in the morning, and I would never read a business book at night. But The Phoenix Project and The Unicorn Project, I've read them several times as bedtime books.

Kit Friend:

Yeah. To your kids, Nick? Do you sit there [crosstalk 00:52:01]

Nick Muldoon:

I will. I'll get there. I'm starting to teach them about Lean principles, build quality in. Yeah.

Kit Friend:

Yeah. If you haven't done it already, getting your kids to story point Lego is really amusing and I've enjoyed a lot. I know it's just like time gym, but I enjoy doing it with my son, Ethan, because you know how difficult it is to get adults to get relative sizing in units, and kids just get it. It's wonderful how they just don't get distracted by the fact that you've got an abstract unit, and they're like, "I get that idea." I got Ethan story pointing in five minutes, I've struggled to get some adults story pointing in like five days and they argue about, "Do you mean it's days, ideal days, hours?" Things.

Kit Friend:

So yeah, Unicorn Project I think are really good. I haven't actually read it all yet, but I do want to read and I recommend the whole time because of a really good podcast, 99 [inaudible 00:52:51] Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez. So when we talk about being customer centric and about really knowing who we're providing our products for, I think there's a really powerful story around making sure we understand the data and when we're going through, and Invisible Women has some amazing, horrifying, but amazing stories and bits of data and narrative around it. So I think those would be my three at the moment, three's a good number to ask people to start with, isn't it?

Nick Muldoon:

Okay, cool. Kit, this has been wonderful. My takeaway is I've got to read The Invisible Woman, because I haven't heard that book.

Kit Friend:

Invisible Women, there's lots of them is the problem, Nick.

Nick Muldoon:

Invisible Women, okay. Thank you. That's my takeaway that I've got to read. Kit, this has been beautiful, I really enjoyed our chat this morning.

Kit Friend:

It was a pleasure as well. Thank you so much for having me, Nick.

Nick Muldoon:

I hope you have a wonderful day, and I look forward to talking about this journey again. I want to come back and revisit this.

Kit Friend:

Yeah. Let's do a check in. We should do our DISK profiles for the next one maybe, and we can find out maybe I'm meant to be a product owner and you should be, I don't know, you'll be like test lead or something it'll say. I don't know. We'll find out.

Nick Muldoon:

It's beautiful. All right, thanks so much, Kit. Have a wonderful day.

Kit Friend:

And you. Bye now.

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