Living Agile out of IT

When they say it takes time to change culture, they aren’t lying. When they say let the team take decisions, they’re spot on.

Nowadays I work as a supervisor for a Data Management, supporting three different processes. When the Customer team and I first met, there was a bit of chaos on understanding who’s doing what, what the priorities were, where the team needed support and, most importantly, what was running late.

Coming from a tenure IT, being introduced to and practicing Agile, it was time to try to combine and apply knowledge to a different context.

Kanban ideas and principles were the starting point.

We made use of existing technology to put our tasks to the board. Yes, I said our tasks (mine included) because I’m also a team member. It was a bit of a challenge to uncover exactly what each team member was doing and what to add to the board: reports, specific e-mails, metrics, problems resolution, data analysis… It’s hard on the beginning, when some try not to add everything – they may feel like you’re going to ‘monitor’ and chase each step they take – while others try to add every single activity in their day – they want to show how important (busy) they are. There were people creating a task for adding tasks to the board! At least, they got the idea. 😊

Visibility: checkmark. We now know what each one has to do and/or is doing. Now, what do we do with this? How to track the advances? We have a backlog and we don’t want to lose sight nor things get delayed. Why not checking the board every day?

Oops, a bit of Scrum here: backlog, daily track… Interesting.

Well, the team adopted the ideas. And they met even on the days I was off – one was selected to drive the conversation on what’s being done, who needs support where, why something is delayed.

It then occurs that, since experience was showing positive, I started doing the same for the Vendor team. Board plus daily meetings to track our tasks. To add some pepper and manage my own agenda, I gave them autonomy in a way I participate on teams daily meeting every other day – I join Customers meeting Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and Vendors on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Since Vendors team saw the benefits from Customers, it wasn’t hard to see them adopting the same routine. So, on the days I’m with one team, the other team keep looking at the board and moving their tasks.

And everything was running within expected parameters: meetings occurring, people who can’t join in a day, but, participate in the other, people who forget to update some tasks, tasks that get delayed. Wait. I said tasks getting delayed. How is that if we have daily meetings? Well, it isn’t a perfect world, is it? Some tasks depend on people external to the team, some urgent things come in changing priorities and all the stuff we all know that happens in any organization. The point is that we know what’s delayed, who’s pending on it and why. We can then organize ourselves, brake tasks down into smaller pieces, one team member (by their own initiative) assume tasks from other peers. (Shame on me when my tasks are delayed and the team asks me why and by when I’ll get them done)

All of this took couple of months to get stabilized. But here it comes the thing that made me think of writing this.

Well, unless there’s a hard due date for a task, they’re given freedom to establish the completion date. This week I couldn’t join on Monday’s meeting for Customers team. How surprised I am after the meeting, when I receive a note saying that, as they see there are many things to complete, they analyzed efforts and prioritized themselves what will be done this week. Without even knowing, they implemented the first sprint!

You don’t know how proud I am to “see my kids growing”. They’re becoming more mature in Agile without even noticing they’re doing it. Of course, there’s still a road ahead, but, they’re on the journey and stepped in months ago when they were given tools, insights and most importantly, autonomy.

No, this isn’t Kanban or Scrum in essence, but I start seeing Agile in a Business area. Good for us. Challenge for me. The bar was raised, and we must keep it there (and going up).