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| Leadership quote by photosteve01 / CC BY 2.0 |
I am thankful to George Fetokakis, Editor-In-Chief of Netweek to make it possible and for the interesting questions.
Since I realized that the interview was only published in Greek, I decided to post it here in English and share it with a bigger community.
Trust you will find value in it.
Looking forward to your feedback and comments.
1. How did you get started
in the Agile world?
Interesting enough, I actually started my Agile
journey in Greece. At the end of 2009 I got the chance to be part of
kicking-off the Agile transformation in a big development organization of
around 2000 people. So I got to spend 3 months in Patras, together with other
18 apprentice coaches from all over the world and 9 consultants among the most
knowledgeable Agile coaches and trainers at that time. Every single day of
those 3 months was an incredible learning experience and that still remains the
most exciting and fun period in my professional career. Which better place to
start a life-changing journey than the place which gave birth to the Western
culture?
2. What does success mean for you
in this world?
In my opinion success in this context for a company or
an organization means: effectively leveraging on Agile values and principles to
achieve your specific goal sustainably in the fast changing world we are called
to live right now.
For a development team success means delighting your
customer with products that actually solve their problems. For me personally success
means contributing to transforming our world of work in something more meaningful
for human beings.
3. What are the top skills
that an effective Agile coach should have?
The two coaching skills which helped me most in my
7-year experience as Agile coach are: empathy and situational awareness. Empathy
is a crucial skill for coaches and leaders.
I learned that people want to feel themselves valued
and appreciate when someone is truly listening and not judgmental. This doesn´t
come easy: it is a skill to practice to be able to listen for potential, namely
listening to people not for what they are, but for what they can become in the
future and be committed to help them become the best they can be.
With situational awareness I mean the ability to be
really present, observe carefully and understand what is going on around you:
the ability of “reading the room” or “smelling the room” beyond what is said.
4. How Agile (and Scrum)
has changed the way that the developers think and work?
Agile and Scrum are incredibly effective change
engines: they trigger a paradigm shift in everything. Not only in how we
develop products and services, but in how we lead, in the way we collaborate
with each other, in the way we interact with customers, in how we consider ourselves
as professionals. Embracing agility means embracing continuous change, which in
turn simply means embracing reality. Someone said: life is what happens while
we are making other plans. Believing that things will stay still just to please
our plans is the ultimately insane wishful thinking.
5. Scrum is simple but not
easy. How difficult is to make a company Agile?
Being simple is definitely one of the strengths of
Scrum but also one if its pitfalls: it is so simple that many managers fall
into the trap of believing it can become a magic wand for the company´s
problems. A famous quote from Ken Schwaber, co-inventor of Scrum, is: “Agile
development will not solve any of your problems. It will just make them so
painfully visible that ignoring them is harder”.
And that´s where the tough part starts! Scrum is not
plug-and-play! It´s not just a SW methodology upgrade. It changes some of the
basic assumptions about how products get developed! It´s like installing an iOS
9 app on an iOS 4: it won´t work! You need to upgrade the Operating System! Only
courageous leaders, who are willing to make an impact, dare to start the
journey to upgrade their company´s operating system.
6. What should companies do to achieve a successful transformation in the Agile world?
The first step is about asking “Why?” What is the problem
we are trying to solve? There must be a clear need for any improvement change:
imagine how crucial it is to start off such a dramatic change. So any
successful Agile transformation implies a top-down approach, in terms of Company
values, leadership culture, business goals and management support. However, there
are aspects that need to emerge bottom-up, like practices to be selected by self-organized
teams. It has to be a sandwich strategy! Given the importance of the top-down
part in the enterprise change, one of the initial steps is to educate managers,
for them to understand the why, be able to share and communicate the vision,
embrace Agile values and be ready to support people with a new leadership
style. Many times this critical step is down prioritized, if not even
neglected.
Finally it is extremely important that teams are
organized so that they can deliver value to customer as fast as possible,
replacing functional teams organized around the system architecture. Effective
teams are cross-functional and have all the competences needed to transform a
backlog item in a product increment within one Sprint.
7. What words of advice would
you give to people who are just getting started with Agile themselves?
Every context is different: so simply copying from
others will not work. Scrum is a good way to start, it is a great teacher: if
you have never tried Agile development, Scrum can give you the framework to be
able to start. At the same time, you need to know many things outside Scrum to
make Scrum work effectively: having an experienced Agile coach to guide you
through the first challenges can be a key differentiator between success and
failure.
8. What are the biggest
challenges that they have to confront, what are the biggest mistakes that they
should avoid?
I have seen few recurrent failure patterns: Product Owners
without authority, knowledge or time, superficial knowledge and lack of
coaching on Agile practices and principles, complacency as opposite to a
culture of continuous improvement. Well, avoiding these failure patterns is one
of the biggest challenges to confront. One of the biggest mistakes is considering
Agile as something to implement: Agile is rather something you are or can be.
Agile is an adjective, not a noun.
9. What should people and
teams do to make their workplaces and lives more productive with Agile and
Lean?
There are few things that helped me become more
productive and I have seen also helping individuals and teams I have coached:
- When you
have a question to answer, spend time in understanding the question before
jumping to the answer.
- Do not make
assumptions: genuinely ask why. If you have to make assumptions, try to
validate them as soon as possible.
- Challenge
how things have always been done.
- Work on
your strengths, more than your improvement areas.
- If you wish
to succeed at anything, have a clear vision of what you want to achieve
and consistently take baby steps in the right direction.
10. Where do you see things
going to Agile in the future? What changes are coming?
I see contrasting things. From one side I see more and
more “Agile” instances which have nothing to do with agility, where people and
especially managers have lost or probably never got the original meaning of Agile
manifesto: where, for instance, individuals and interactions are in service of
processes and tools rather than the opposite. This can be also considered a
normal evolution. When an innovation reaches the hype, it starts getting late
majority or even laggards in the game: they probably accept Agile just to look
fashionable or to please their boss. On the bright side I see a convergence of researches,
theories, methods and practices coming from really different domains (Entrepreneurship,
Neuroscience, Psychology, Finance, Management, Non-profits, even Military and
Government) which are collectively creating a very visible red thread. And this
red thread is all about coping effectively with fast change by using an
empirical approach, embracing individuals as whole human beings not as
resources to exploit, being mindful, decentralizing power, and creating
meaningful relationships. That´s really exciting and resonates a lot with
agility. On a broader scale, our generation is experiencing a growth in our
consciousness as human race (let’s take for instance social responsibility) and
that´s going to create benefits not only to our industry but to the entire
world.
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