Easy Agile Podcast Ep.30 Aligned and thriving: The power of team alignment

"Great convo with Dave & Eric! Key takeaway: revamp Easy Agile's org structure representation. Exciting stuff!"

Nick Muldoon, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Easy Agile, is joined by Dave West, CEO, and Eric Naiburg, COO, from Scrum.org.

In this episode, Nick, Dave, and Eric unpack the current agile landscape, discussing the role of the agile native and emphasizing the importance of building connected teams by flipping the hierarchy and putting leaders in supporting roles.

They emphasise the importance of empowering the people closest to the problem to make the call, and ultimately creating an environment for success to happen.

We hope you enjoy the episode!

Share your thoughts and questions on Twitter using the #easyagilepodcast and make sure to tag @EasyAgile.

Transcript:

Nick Muldoon:

Hi folks. Welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast. My name's Nick Muldoon. I'm the co-founder and co CEO at Easy Agile, and today I'm joined with two wonderful guests, Eric Naiburg, the Chief operating officer at scrum.org, and Dave West, the chief executive officer at scrum.org. Before we begin, I'd just like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast today, the people of the Dharawal speaking country. We pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging, and extend the same respect to all Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and First Nations people that are joining us today. So gentlemen, thank you so much for making some time. We really appreciate it.

Eric Naiburg:

Thank you.

Nick Muldoon:

I guess I'd love to just jump in and, Dave, I've got a question for you first and a follow on for you, Eric. I'd love to just get a quick assessment, Dave, of the Agile landscape today and I guess the shifts that you may have seen now that we're out of these COVID lockdowns, these back and forth, COVID lockdowns.

Dave West:

Yeah, it's interesting. So I've been the CEO almost eight years here at scrum.org, and it has changed a bit during those eight years. I think what we're seeing and is a, dare I say, the deployment phase, mass deployment of these Agile ways of working and this Agile mindset throughout industries and throughout all organizations. It's more than an IT software development thing. And I think that that was accelerated during COVID. What's interesting though is many of the characteristics of Agile that became so important during COVID, particularly around empowered teams, particularly around trust, particularly around the hierarchy and the reduction of hierarchy, some of those things are being challenged as we return to the new normal, which some people would rather was just the normal. So I am seeing some of that. However, generally Agile is here, it's here to stay. I think the reality is that most knowledge workers, particularly those knowledge workers dealing in complex work are going to be using some kind of Agile approach for the foreseeable future.

Nick Muldoon:

And last week you... Was it last week? I believe you were in Paris for the first face to face?

Dave West:

[foreign language 00:02:37] I was and it rained the entire time actually, Nick. So yeah, I spent a lot of time inside in Paris.

Nick Muldoon:

Well, what was the sentiment from the Scrum trainers there, from the conversations they're having?

Dave West:

Yeah, it was interesting. We talked a lot about at scale, enterprise adoption, the challenges. It is funny that the challenges are challenges that you expect, and most of them are about people, legacy systems, people status, power position. We talked a lot about the challenges that teams are getting in these large complicated organizations. That continues to be the conversation. There is, obviously, this is Europe, they're very close to Ukraine and the conflict there. So there's definitely some conversations about that. We have six Ukrainian trainers and also about the same number of Russian trainers as well. So that's always a conversation. And then there's a general downturn of the economy that was also being talked about.

Layoffs are happening throughout Europe, and particularly in the technology sector, but I think that's growing to some extent. Vodafone just announced today that they were laying off, it's about 6,000 employees, and they're one of the biggest telecommunication companies in Germany, for instance. So there was definitely some of that, but so if you add enterprise, you add conflict uncertainty, you add economic uncertainty, those three things will come together. But what was funny in it is that throughout all of this, they were incredibly upbeat and excited. And I think because they're talking to people that they've never spoken to before, they're talking to people about how Scrum is a natural way of working, talking about the challenges of empowered teams, empiricism, continuous improvement.

And I had some really exciting conversations with trainers who were like, Yeah, well we're doing this in this aerospace company or this electric car supplier in Germany or whatever, or this financial services startup that's using blockchain for the first time. And of course they're using Agile. And so it was funny. It was almost as though all of those things, though there were the backdrop, it was still incredibly positive.

Nick Muldoon:

So this is interesting, and I guess if I reflect on the background for both of you, Eric, I'm looking at, you two have worked together from rational days-

Eric Naiburg:

A few times.

Nick Muldoon:

... a few times, but the prevalence of the Agile... I would describe you two as Agile natives and it sounds like, Dave, you've got your tribe there in Paris last week that are Agile natives. And I guess Eric, for you, what's the sense around the people that you are interacting with from a leadership perspective in these companies? Can you identify the Agile natives? Yeah, I guess is it an easier conversation if you've got Agile natives in leadership levels?

Eric Naiburg:

It's definitely an easier conversation if they're there. Sometimes they're in hiding, sometimes they're not Agile natives masquerading as Agile natives as well, which always makes it a little bit difficult because you have to peel back that onion and peel through who are they and what's their real agenda. I was talking to a CIO last week, and he was talking about the typical CIO lasts two to three years. So what is their real agenda? What are they trying to achieve? And Dave mentioned the people part of this, and people often become the hardest part of any Agile transformation or working in an Agile way. People want to protect themselves, they want to protect their turf, they want to do the things that they need to do to be successful as well. So you see that as talking to leaders within organizations, and they want to do better, they want to improve, they want to deliver faster, but they've still got that pressure. Organizations, at least large organizations, haven't changed. They still have boards, and they still report to those boards, and those boards still have their agendas as well.

Nick Muldoon:

You're making me recall a conversation that I had, this is several years ago, but on a trip through Europe, and it was with the Agile native, that was the Agile practice lead and probably wasn't masking, probably was legitimately an Agile native, yet they were talking about the mixed incentives for their, maybe not their direct leader, but the VP further up. And it was actually a, I don't want to say a zero-sum game, but there was some kind of fiefdom thing going where the various VPs would fight for resources, people, whatever, because that would unlock further bonus. But at the end of the day, it was not optimizing the entire financial services company. Are we still seeing that today?

Dave West:

Oh, very much so. In fact, a colleague of ours says, "Science used to have a saying, science progresses one funeral at a time." And I think Agile definitely has some of that, not funerals hopefully, but retirements.

Nick Muldoon:

Retirements

Dave West:

Retirement.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah.

Dave West:

Yeah. The reality is that when you don't have incentives aligned, where you don't have teams aligned to those incentives and leadership aligned to those consistent incentives, then you're going to always be dealing with some challenges. What's so frustrating is we all know the industrial revolution, and particularly the recent revolution of mass production and oil, which just happened in the deployment phase just after the second World War, was enabled by changing working practices created by people like Ford and Deming and all of these people. We all know that. The digital revolution is happening around us. It may even pass us if you believe the AI buzz that's happening. We may be put to the side and computers may just take over, but this digital is happening, and you are in with leaders and they're like, "Yeah, totally respect that. We are going to be a hundred percent digital. We are an airline, but really we are a digital company with wings."

They describe themselves in this way, and then they don't want to challenge the fundamentals of how authority, how value is managed, how risk is made transparent, how governance is, it happens, how funding is made and planning, et cetera. They don't want to challenge any of those assumptions. They like that the way it is. But we are going digital. It is ironic that it still is happening. However, that isn't totally hundred percent. The organizations that get it, the organizations that have leaders that are either insightful, either motivated, or maybe they want to write a book or something. Maybe their reasons aren't always as clear, but those leaders are dragging these organizations into the 21st century.

Great example. Proctor and Gamble, Gillette. Gillette, the latest exfoliating razor. I can see you haven't used it, unfortunately, Nick, with your rather handsome beard. So yeah. Anyway, I use it a lot, as you can tell. The exfo... Was built using Scrum and Agile. This is Proctor and Gamble, an ancient, okay not ancient, an older organization, but really has got it. They realize that if they want to keep up with their customers, their partners, their suppliers, they need to work in quite different ways. And so it isn't roses, but there are roses in the garden as it were.

Eric Naiburg:

And it goes beyond, when you think of that organization, you think of what Gillette has done, is it goes beyond traditional Agile thinking. Traditional Agile thinking, we think software, and this is engineering, this is manufacturing, this is bringing together marketing because in those types of organizations, marketing drives what the product's going to be, and then engineering figures out how to deliver that product and so on. So it's really bringing together the whole organization into how do we deliver something, and deliver it together. I think that's one of the big things that we're seeing. And one of the big changes that Agile helps to drive is that team. So you talked about incentives and team incentives, that's a piece of it, but it's team ownership. It's team togetherness.

It is that ultimately they all feel accountable, and bringing that accountability together as a team versus, and I think even... So my wife's in manufacturing and it's always... She's on the R and D side of it, and complaining about the marketing people. You have those conversations of, "Well, they don't realize what it takes to actually build this thing. They just have the dream." And by bringing them together in that team, and really they're having their daily scrums, they're planning together and they're having those hard conversations respectfully, that starts to build that team and build them in a way that they're able to actually deliver faster and more what the customer wants.

Dave West:

Can I just lean in, I'm sorry, we just taken over here a little Nick, but I just want to lean into something that Eric said around it is all about the teams. One of the fundamental problems we see in many organizations is hierarchy. Because if you get these massive hierarchies, obviously there's, "I've got to be in control of something. I need to take ownership of things. I need to be off irresponsible for certain things." That's how hierarchies work. And so that often undermines the ability of a team to effectively function. We need to flip that so that these hierarchies become, instead of being on top of the teams, they need to be underneath the teams supporting them. Think of them as those support trusses on bridges or whatever. You have some fabulous bridges in Australia and in Melbourne and in places like that and in Sydney.

So think of it upside down, holding up the teams. But that means, going back all again to incentives again, that those leaders need to understand what they're responsible for in this new world. And they're doing it for very good reason. They're doing it because the teams need to be, they're closer to the problem, they need to be empowered to make the decisions in real time based on the data, the information they have, they need to have clean line of sight to the customer. All of those things are the reason why a hierarchy is just too slow to respond and too bureaucratic. So we need to flip it and enable those teams. And that's a huge challenge.

Nick Muldoon:

I Love this. You two have given me something to ponder. So for the first six years of the company's life, of Easy Agile's life, we did have a very simple team page, and Dave and I as co-CEOs were at the bottom of the page. And then you had the leaders of the pillars. So you had, at the time, Tegan was the head of product, the leader, and they sat on top of Dave and I, and then the team sat on top of that. And it's interesting, I'm actually trying to reflect now, it's probably only in the last 12 or 18 months as we went through 40 people, that that page or that visualization has flipped. I've got an action item obviously to come out of this, thank you gentlemen, to actually go and flip it back because it's a communications mechanism, but if we actually put ourselves at the foundation in this supporting role for supporting the folks, that sets the tone, I imagine, for the team members in how they think of themselves and maybe that accountability piece as well, Eric.

Eric Naiburg:

Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting because sometimes it's those little things that change how people think and feel. I use a lot of sports analogies when I talk and meet with people, and especially with where Dave was talking of empowering the people closest to the problem. We have to do the same in sport. If we have to wait for the manager to tell us to pass the ball, it's never going to happen. We've got to allow the people to make decisions and make those decisions on the field. We need to apply that to business as well. Allow the people who are closest to the problem, closest to what's happening, make those decisions within the business as well.

Nick Muldoon:

So if we come back to Proctor and Gamble, and we don't have to rabbit hole on it, but they're one of the large, long-lived companies, and I don't know about their approach, in particular, but I think about GE, and GE had their internal training university program, and they were training their leaders, training their managers how to manage, training their leaders how to lead. How does a Proctor and Gamble go about shifting that conversation internally, and what's that timeframe? Because presumably you've start with someone that's on a team. Do you have to elevate them over time through the hierarchy of the company?

Dave West:

It is interesting. I'm fortunate to spend maybe because we're both British people living in Boston, I'm fortunate to spend quite a lot of time with, and there's videos on our site with this, by the way, interviews with Dave Ingram who runs R and D for male grooming, it's called, in the Gillette part of P and G. And the case study is out there. So I talked to him a lot about how you drive it in a huge organization where they've got everything to lose. They've got products that are amazing, they've innovated, those products are the products that you put into your shopping cart as you walk down the aisle. They don't want to muck that up. Let's be frank. If suddenly, because of some innovation, there's no razors on the shelves, then I, as a board man need a razor. So I will buy an alternate product, and it's possible that then I'll always buy that product.

So they've got to be very, very careful. They've got more to lose. So we talk a lot about how you manage change and it's all of the above. What he's done very smartly is he's empowered the product owner role or the person, the glue role, whether it's using Scrum or something else, and he's really invested in these change agents in his organization, and he's definitely led by doing, he's been very honest and open about that, and very clear that he doesn't have all the answers and he's looking for them to help him during this, which isn't perhaps what you'd expect from a traditional organization where-

Nick Muldoon:

The leader might need to feel that they have the answer to all of these questions.

Dave West:

Exactly. And he's done a really, really good job of doing that. And primarily because he says, "Well, my success is ultimately their success, so if I can make them be a little bit more successful, there's more of them than me, so let's make it work." Which I think is an unusually honest and very insightful view of it. So he's driven it predominantly through product management ownership areas. He's then provided a support environment around that. He's then definitely advertised the successes. He's spent a lot of time building cross-functional teams. The thing that Eric was talking about. And really been very careful working with their leadership. If you're material science, there's a whole department, if there's marketing, there's this whole channel thing that they have. Basically working with their leaders to create the environment for success to happen. And I don't think it's easy. I think there's many surprising roadblocks along the way, and I can't speak for him on this, but he's taken that divide and conquer approach, focusing on that catalyst role.

Nick Muldoon:

Because you, obviously, you're providing a lot of training for various, well, I guess people at various levels in these companies. And obviously it's a far cry from having a CST and a CSM and a CSPO certification going back a decade, decade and a half. What's the uptake around the leadership training? And what does that look like, Eric? Is there renewed interest in that at the moment or are people demanding more of that leadership training? Is it fit for purpose for today's leader?

Eric Naiburg:

So I think to a point it is. We're certainly seeing growth in the leadership training. Matter of fact, Dave and I were just looking at those numbers earlier this week or yesterday, I guess. Today's [inaudible 00:21:29]

Nick Muldoon:

Are there are any numbers you can share with us?

Eric Naiburg:

It's hard to share the exact numbers, but we're seeing double-digit growth in number of students taking our leadership classes. Both how do you measure, so our evidence-based management classes, as well as our leadership training, but that also only goes so far because a lot of those folks, depending on how high up, especially in the organization you go, aren't willing to take lots of time out to take such training. So a lot of it happens in that coaching. They're hiring the executive coaches or the Agile coaches that are in there. The scrum masters that are in there are actually working to help coach those folks. And a lot of it's less about the training and more about the mindset shifts. So if you look at our Agile leadership course, a large part of it is spent on getting people to think differently. And really some of it's hit you over the head type of activities, where it really helps to drive those points across of, "Wow, I need to think differently. I need to work differently. I need to treat people differently."

Nick Muldoon:

Differently.

Eric Naiburg:

It's that, and we're seeing good success with that because especially when that light bulb goes off for folks, and that light bulb that goes off saying, "Wow, this is different." We have some exercises in our classes that really get you thinking and get you... There's one, for example, where you're thinking you're doing the right thing for the customer, and you're thinking you're doing exactly right until it kills the customer, because you didn't necessarily think through the whole. It's, "Well, this is what the customer wanted, so we need to do it, but maybe I should have got together with the team and let the team make decisions." I'm going a little extreme, but-

Nick Muldoon:

No, I appreciate it.

Eric Naiburg:

... it's those sorts of things that we have to change. And a lot of what we do in the course is educate leaders on what those teams are going through, and what the individuals on those teams need, and the type of support that they need, not how do you manage those teams, not how do you manage those people. But how do you empower and enable those people to be successful?

Nick Muldoon:

I want to just rewind for a second, sorry.

Eric Naiburg:

Killing people.

Nick Muldoon:

It sounded like there's a friction point in actually getting these leaders to take the time out of the office to go and get some education.

Eric Naiburg:

There is, yes.

Nick Muldoon:

Is that correct?

Eric Naiburg:

Yeah.

Dave West:

It's incredibly hard if you're at a large organization, in particular, when your schedule is overlapping meetings continuously eight to nine hours a day for them to take that moment to step back. Everybody, I believe very strongly, Nick, that everybody needs to take time to invest in their own personal and professional development. And that time is not a waste. Ultimately it is an incredibly good investment.

Nick Muldoon:

Yes.

Dave West:

We know-

Nick Muldoon:

It's great ROI.

Dave West:

Totally. Even if it just resets you, even if you have that moment of clarity because of it. it's not a surprise that people like Bill Gates go on retreat every three to six months and he takes his big bag of books-

Nick Muldoon:

Books.

Dave West:

And he goes off grid for a few days just to reset. I think that that time is incredibly effective. But what's interesting is, we are under, in America in particular, and I'm sure it's true in Australia, it's certainly true in England, where I'm from, motion is more important than outcomes. It's all about the motions. If you look busy, you're not going to get fired. And I think to some extent we learned that in school. I don't know if your parents said to you or maybe you got your first job. I was working on a delicatessen counter at the co-op supermarket, and I remember there was an old worker there, turned to me, he goes, "Whatever you do, when the manager walks by," Mr. Short-

Nick Muldoon:

Look busy.

Dave West:

... was his name. And he was everything that name implies. "Mr. Short walks by, look like you're doing something, start cleaning something, otherwise he'll take you off and make you do provisions, and you don't want to dealing with that milk, it's rancid." And I remember that. Look busy. And I think we've got a lot in our culture. I try to take time every week. I book, for instance, my lunch hour, I book it and I always try to do something in it. I try to watch a TED talk, read something, just to clear your mind to think about something different. I think that time is incredibly important. However-

Nick Muldoon:

Get exposed to some new perspective, right?

Dave West:

Exactly. Even if it means, even if the stuff you're watching or whatever isn't that relevant necessarily. Sometimes that lack of relevance is exactly what you need because your mind does something.

Nick Muldoon:

A mental break.

Dave West:

Exactly. And however in corporate America, and I think that's corporate in general, that doesn't happen. People are overly leveraged, they're incredibly busy. They have to attend these meetings, otherwise their profile is diminished. And I think that's at the detriment of the organization and the company. Here's a question, Nick.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah.

Dave West:

Who have you helped recently?

Nick Muldoon:

Who have I helped recently? I spend most of my time, and I get most of my energy out of coaching conversations with individuals. So on my [inaudible 00:27:35] profile, I've got futurist very high up, and so I love exploring what is your life and your career going to look like in five years time? They're the conversations that I really get jazzed by.

Dave West:

And that's what everybody... Who have you helped is more important than what have you done.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah.

Dave West:

And I think you need to balance that.

Nick Muldoon:

I pulled up these stats because I thought you might find them interesting. We did a survey last year of a subset of our customers. And we had 423 teams. So it's not a huge sample size, but 423 teams. And the reason I think about it is because there's a lot of, what was the statistic here? So just to give you a sense, most common sprint duration is 14 or two week sprints. Most teams have six people that are involved. Fibonacci for story pointing, an estimation. 10% of these teams achieved what they set out to achieve at the start of the sprint. And so the teams, this 10% of teams, the subset, they did add work into their sprints, but teams that were unsuccessful, rolled work from sprint to sprint.

And so perhaps what it indicated to us is that there are teams that over commit and under deliver, and in fact 90% of them, 90% of the survey teams, it would appear that they over commit and under deliver. And then there are teams that are, maybe, leaving time, Dave, maybe for some education or some spare time in their two-week sprint. And they actually happen to pull on more work and they achieve that. And I'm just thinking about that from a sense of, are 90% of these teams trying to be busy or are they trying to be perceived to be busy? Even if it's at the expense of actually delivering?

Eric Naiburg:

Or are they even pushed into it? It's interesting, there's a question on our professional scrum master one, our PSM one test that often people get wrong. And I think it's a great question, which is, I'm paraphrasing because I don't remember it exactly, but it's essentially how much of the sprint backlog needs to be filled coming out of sprint planning. And a significant number of people say it needs to be complete coming out of sprint planning. Which goes in the face of Agile and Scrum.

Dave West:

Exactly.

Eric Naiburg:

Because we don't know there. There's that uncertainty. All we need is enough to get started, and once we get started, but I think people are fearful of, "Well, we've got two weeks, we need to be able to plan those two weeks and we better be able," and this is some of that top-down pressure that we talked about. "Well, we need to show that we've got two weeks worth of work here and that we're not sitting around, so let's fill it up." And those are some of the misnomers about Agile and Scrum. "Well, it's a two-week sprint, we need to plan two weeks." Well, no, we don't. We need to have a goal. Where are we going to get to? How we achieve it is going to take time because we're going to learn as we go. As a matter of fact, the scrum team that I'm on right now, we were running a three-week sprint, and two weeks in we've actually achieved our goal. And now we're able to build upon that goal. And we already delivered on that goal a week early, which is great.

Nick Muldoon:

Do you think, Eric, that there's a fear from leadership that if people haven't got two weeks worth of work teed up, that they're just going to be twiddling their thumbs?

Eric Naiburg:

I don't know that it's a fear from leadership. I think it's a perception that the workers have of what leadership is thinking. I think it's more that. And I think it's the, "Well, we said we've got two weeks," and they are going to ask us, management's going to say, "When will you deliver?" I don't know that we'll ever get away from that when will we deliver question, even though we continually try to get away from that answer. But they're going to ask it. So if they're going to ask it, I better be prepared, which means I better have a whole bunch of work laid out. And that just breaks everything that we teach. It breaks everything that we think in Agile.

And all I need in planning is I need a goal, and some idea of how I'm going to get there. And over time let's revisit it and let's continue to revisit it and go to it. But it amazes me how often that some of the answers to that question are, you have a full sprint backlog go coming out of sprint planning, you have enough to get started. I forget what some of the others are. But it amazes me how many times when I review tests people put the full back sprint backlog where it even says, right in the scrum guide, "You're going to inspect and adapt throughout the sprint." Well, how do I inspect and adapt if I've already decided what I'm going to do?

Nick Muldoon:

Who's the onus on? If it's not actually the leadership's wish that you fill up all your time and you operate at a hundred percent capacity, then is the onus on the leader to make it known or is the onus on the team to engage in the conversation?

Dave West:

It's the leader.

Eric Naiburg:

Yes.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. Yes, both. Yeah.

Dave West:

I think it's more the leader because I think they have to create the environment where the team actually can challenge it, and actually have that very clear conversation. What worries me about your stan is the fact that I don't... The first few sprints. Yes, maybe you get overly excited, maybe you fill the sprint, which you don't need to. Maybe you're just keen. That's okay. The thing is, what happens on sprint three or four or five, when the same pattern is manifesting itself over and over again. That's worrying. And I think that speaks really clearly to the lack of help the team's having. Whether you call it an Agile coach, and in Australia, I think the Agile manager is a phrase that's used, or whether it's an Agile, or whether it's a scrum master, whatever. Scrum.org has a scrum master.

And the reason why we have a scrum master isn't because we don't know scrum, though there's some days it might be questionable. But cobbler's children, all that stuff. But the reality is, we do know Scrum, we talk it, we breathe it, we love it. But having somebody that steps back and says, "Hang on, Westy, what have you done there? Have you forced encouraged the team to fill the sprint? Have you set them an unrealistic goal? Have you listened to them and asked them the questions? Or have you told them what you want? And what do you think that's going to do?" I know that I have, because Eric and I fund the sprints, as it were. When we go to a sprint review and we say stuff, because a sprint review is ultimately there to provide feedback to the team, to allow them to inspect and adapt for the next sprint.

You can't change the past, but you can change the future based on feedback. If I go in with, "Oh, well that's rubbish and you should do this, and what about that?" Yeah, it's going to have an impact. So ultimately we have to think about, as leaders, what we bring, and also have somebody often helping us to be the leader that we need to be because we get excited and we get enthusiastic and we get, "Oh, you can do this and that? Let's do it. That sounds awesome." And sometimes that can...

Eric Naiburg:

And that's part of why I say it's both. That's why I said the yes. It's on the leader, but the leader needs to be reminded of that. The leader needs to be supported by that, especially by the product owner and the scrum master. The product owner has to be able to say no. The product owner has to... I talk about happy ears and most CEOs and senior leaders are-

Nick Muldoon:

Happy ears?

Eric Naiburg:

Yeas. Most CEOs and senior leaders I've worked with have what I call happy ears. They come from one customer or they talk to one person and heard something that-

Dave West:

Do this.

Eric Naiburg:

... that one person might have thought was great. And next thing you know, they're putting all these new requirements on the team. And I've worked in many startups and big companies where, even at IBM, that happened. And the product owner needs to be able to say, "Whoa, hold on. That's a great idea. Let's think about it. And we'll put it on the backlog, we'll think about it later. But let's not distract the team right now from what we're trying to do and what we're trying to achieve." And that's why I say it's both. It's not just on the leader. You're not going to fully change the leader. You're not going to fully change them to not have those exciting moments. And that's what makes them entrepreneurs. That's what makes them who they are.

But the team needs to be able to push back. The leader needs to be accepting of that pushback and the scrum master and the product owner, as well as others on the team, need to be able to have that pushback. I remember very, very early in my career, I worked for a company called Logicworks. We had a data model, a little data modeling tool called Irwin. And I remember sitting in my cube, and the CEO had just come back from a meeting with one client, and comes over, and I was a product manager-

Nick Muldoon:

Eric, do this.

Eric Naiburg:

And starts talking about, we need to go do this now, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, well, hold on. It's like, but blah, blah, blah said they'd buy it. Well one, did you actually talk to the people using it? Or did you talk to somebody way up here who has no idea how they're actually using the tool? Which the answer was talking to CEO to CEO conversation. And just because they'll buy it, will anybody? But you have to be able to have those conversations. You have to build that trust with the leader from the team, and from the team to the leader, to be able to have those pushbacks and be able to say, "That's an interesting idea. We'll take it under consideration for the future, but right now we have a focus. We've got a sprint goal and we're not going to destroy our sprint goal because you got excited about something."

Dave West:

As you can see, Nick, I have a really hard time getting any of my ideas into our organization because they ask things like this. So annoying, Nick. They say, "Okay, that's great. Is that more important than these five things that are currently driving our product goal?" I'm like, "Ugh, what do you mean? I can't have dessert and main course and an appetizer? I have to pick one that's just so not fair." And they said, "Well, we could spin up another team and then that requires investment. It's going to take time." And I'm like, "Oh gosh, don't you hate it when you have intelligent, smart teammates?" It's just hard.

Nick Muldoon:

Dave and I have definitely, so Dave Elkin, my co-founder, he comes from an engineering background and I come from a product background. And we've definitely noticed in the last, again, probably in this timeframe, in the last 18 months, as the team's grown or through a certain inflection point, in the past, we would quite come comfortably have conversations about what about this idea and how about that? And we'd try and tease things out, and we'd tease them out with the team, but there was no expectation that that stuff would get picked up. And then we had few examples where teams would go and take on and think that they needed to look at this stuff and we're like, "Oh, no, no, no, sorry, we should clarify that we just wanted to get a brainstorm or we wanted to get a thought out of our head, and we wanted some perspective on it, but this should absolutely not mean that you should chase it down." And so the language and how we've had to approach things like that, or activities like that, has certainly changed.

Eric Naiburg:

I've seen that a lot lately-

Nick Muldoon:

[inaudible 00:39:50] Inflection point.

Eric Naiburg:

... probably in the last two or so years. And I think maybe because of remote, it's made it even worse, because you don't get all the emotion and things. But I've definitely seen a lot more of that, of, "Well, I'm just," I've been told this doesn't translate, "but I'm just spit balling and I'm just throwing an idea out there just to have a conversation." And because the leader said it, people think it's fact and that they want to do it. And all they were doing is, "Hey, I heard this thing. What do you think?"

Nick Muldoon:

What's your perspective?

Eric Naiburg:

Yeah, exactly. And I think as leaders, we have to be very careful to understand the impact of what we're saying, because we may be thinking of it as, "I'm just throwing it out there for some conversation." Somebody sitting at the desk just heard, "Oh, they want us to go do that." And I've seen that a lot in companies recently, including in ours, where the way something's said or what is said is taken on as we must do this versus, "Hey, here's an idea, something to noodle on it." So you're not alone, Nick.

Nick Muldoon:

I love it. Hey, Eric, Oregon, that's a great place to call it. That is, and you have given me, you've both given me a lot to noodle on, so I'd like to say thank you so much from our listeners and from the crew at Easy Agile for joining us today. I really appreciate it. It's been wonderful having you on the podcast.

Dave West:

Well, thank you for inviting us. We're really grateful to be here, and hopefully some of this has made sense, and yeah, let's continue to grow as a community and as a world working in this way, because I think we've got a lot of problems to solve. I think the way we do that is people working effectively in empowered ways. So let's change the world, man.

Nick Muldoon:

I love it. Okay, that's great. Thank you.

"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.