Break and Build – Learning Lessons and Embedding the Change.
Leaning heavily on Jeff Sutherland’s – ‘Scrum. The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time’ (2014) – at EWM we have been gearing up for a breakthrough year this year integrating what we have learnt so far with new practices to embed ‘Best Practice’, trying to remove all internal frictions and create the smoothest journey possible for both our clients and ourselves. This requires an Agile team and hence the interest in Sutherland’s Work.
What Jeff wanted to solve for was a Creative and Adoptive Teamwork in solving complex problems. When Sutherland was working with large organisations he saw the wastage inherent in the Project Management Tools of the time. Taking pointers from his experience in Westpoint Gymnastics Team, where he was surrounded by Olympic Gymnasts, his military training and later his Air Force training (particularly the OODA loop (Observe / Orientate / Decide / Act) Sutherland started to develop his own ideas on project management. He wanted to make visible all that was not right and eliminate waste. The leader would deliver the intent empowering the team to generate the solutions.
He also stumbled across a paper called “The New New Product Development Game” written by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka in 1986 and decided to build on their research using their Rugby term – Scrum – to demonstrate how small teams can work together to achieve more than the sum of their individual parts. They proposed six characteristics;
- Built in Instability
- Self-Organising Project Teams
- Overlapping Development Phases
- Multi Learning
- Subtle Control
- Organisational Transfer of Learning
They believed this would develop change agents by introducing creative, market driven ideas and processes and stated that as well as ‘high quality, low cost and differentiation’ it requires ‘speed and flexibility’ to excel. The focus on interplay and breaking out of siloed roles and responsibilities to generate high performing teams.
The concept was originally developed for Software Engineering but has evolved to incorporate most forms of project and / or change management. Sutherland and his colleagues developed The Agile Manifesto (Manifesto for Agile Software Development) with four values;
- Individuals and Interactions Over Processes and Tools
- Working Software Over Comprehensive Documentation
- Customer Collaboration Over Contract Negotiation
- Responding to Change Over Following a Plan and twelve Agile Manifesto Principles;
- Customer satisfaction through early and continuous software delivery
- Accommodate changing requirements throughout the development process
- Frequent delivery of working software
- Collaboration between the business stakeholders and developers throughout the project
- Support, trust, and motivate the people involved
- Enable face-to-face interactions
- Working software is the primary measure of progress
- Agile processes to support a consistent development pace
- Attention to technical detail and design enhances agility
- Simplicity
- Self-organising teams encourage great architectures, requirements, and designs
- Regular reflections on how to become more effective
Eric Ries book ‘The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses’ (2011) is a similar concept on developing products by producing the minimum viable product (MVP) to the market and adjusting the product based on real consumer feedback. The FCA probably wouldn’t let us do this, but that is not our intent.
We are testing the theories on ourselves. Never having used Ghannt Charts or the ‘Waterfall Method’ of project development (although both remain useful in the right space) in our business, we are developing empowered, creative cross functional teams. We are looking for Marginal Gains (thank you David Brailsford), the 1%s (and Sir Clive Woodward) to generate a high functioning business focused on our clients’ goals.
This has started with refining all the processes and procedures we have developed so far, incorporating new technologies as available, and employing some great people. The next steps are to break what we have built and build back better through a series of micro sprints based upon the Scrum framework.
We have posted about these and will continue to do so as we learn and adapt through the year and into next.
Watch this space and come join us.