Measuring the Value of Agile & Coaching with Damon Poole

Overview

Introduction to Agile Value Management and Lean Value Stream Mapping

In this insightful video on Agile Value Management and Lean Value Stream Mapping, viewers are introduced to transformative strategies that can significantly enhance efficiency and maximize business value. The video serves as a comprehensive guide for anyone looking to improve their project management and decision-making processes. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced professional, this video offers valuable insights and practical applications that you can implement immediately.

Key Points Discussed in Agile Value Management and Lean Value Stream Mapping

The video dives deep into the principles of Agile Value Management, emphasizing the importance of prioritizing high-value tasks that align with company objectives. The speaker shares a case study where the application of these principles could have resulted in a $2.25 million increase in value over a decade. Additionally, the video explains the concept of Lean Value Stream Mapping, demonstrating how this tool can drastically reduce project timelines and improve efficiency by focusing on delivering value more effectively.

Expert Insights on Agile and Lean Methodologies

The speaker, an experienced Agile coach, provides expert insights on the challenges organizations face due to inefficient processes. They emphasize that while Agile methodologies have been effective, there is now a critical need to shift towards Value Management and Lean methodologies to remain competitive. A key insight shared is the importance of working on small, high-value tasks and releasing them promptly to achieve measurable improvements.

Practical Applications of Lean Value Stream Mapping

The video offers practical examples of how Lean Value Stream Mapping can be applied in real-world business scenarios. It compares a traditional 16-month project timeline with a streamlined 5-month process, showcasing the potential to save 44 weeks by eliminating unnecessary delays. The speaker also highlights the negative impact of continual rescoping and decision-making driven by higher-ups rather than customer needs, illustrating common pitfalls that businesses should avoid.

Conclusion and Takeaways on Maximizing Business Value

The video concludes with a compelling message: adopting Agile Value Management and Lean Value Stream Mapping is essential for maximizing efficiency and profitability. The key takeaway is that organizations must focus on delivering small, high-value tasks quickly to stay ahead in a competitive landscape. The speaker encourages viewers to assess their current processes and identify areas for improvement using these methods, ultimately unlocking significant value and ensuring that their efforts are directed toward the most impactful projects.

Transcription

Speaker 2
(0:11) Today, Damon Poole, who is a certified professional coach and a coaching instructor, joins us. (0:18) He’s the co-author of Professional Coaching for Agilists, and he’s been working in the software industry and in development specifically in product and agile coaching for a long time, over 20 years. (0:35) He’s coached and trained thousands of people in Fortune 500 companies, and as today, he’s a regular presenter at meetups and conferences, both locally, nationally, and internationally.
(0:49) So with that, please welcome my good friend, Damon Poole.
Speaker 1
(0:54) Well, thank you, Steve. (0:56) Thank you, Sharon. (0:57) I really appreciate it.
(0:58) And so, yeah, one of the reasons that this topic came up was, you know, ever since I got into Agile anyway, you know, there’s always been this post on LinkedIn, you know, oh, Agile’s dead, and that’s always very interesting. (1:18) So that’s kind of what’s behind the talk. (1:21) We’re not going to spend a lot of time debating is Agile dead or not.
(1:25) We’re going to come at it from a different perspective, right? (1:28) In order to say that something is dead, you kind of have to take its pulse. (1:32) The other thing about that is, if it’s dead, what replaced it?
(1:36) And I don’t know the answer to that question, right? (1:38) So if somebody has an answer to that question, feel free to put it in the chat. (1:41) I’d be very interested because I’ll start teaching that now.
(1:44) Actually, I might even leave the webinar. (1:46) Okay, I won’t leave the webinar. (1:48) Don’t worry.
(1:49) One of the really important questions that I like to ask organizations when I first go in is, which of these, okay, it’s not actually this question, but bear with me. (1:59) Which of these is football? (2:01) Go ahead and put the answer, A, B, C, D, all of the above, none of the above, A, N, D, whatever it is.
(2:08) Go ahead and put it in the chat. (2:10) Let’s see if anybody gets it. (2:12) Which of these, it can be multiple answers.
(2:16) Which of these is football? (2:27) Okay, are you ready for the correct answer? (2:30) It’s all of the above.
(2:33) The one in the upper right may not look like football, but it’s something called, I’m not going to try to pronounce it, but it’s there. (2:40) It’s Italian and it’s football. (2:42) So there you go.
(2:45) But, you know, so we could do the same sort of thing with Agile. (2:48) Which of these is Agile? (2:50) If we have different understandings of what Agile is, right, we could be on different pages and getting different results, different expectations.
(3:00) So what is Agile? (3:01) Well, there is actually one answer to this. (3:03) People argue with this all the time, but there’s really only one answer to this.
(3:06) It’s these guys, right? (3:08) It’s the Agile manifesto is the definition of Agile, right?(3:12) It’s not just Agile, it’s Agile as in the Agile manifesto.
(3:16) We could use the word separately and that could be nimble or flexible or whatever.(3:19) That’s really cool. (3:20) But what we’re talking about here is Agile as defined in the Agile manifesto.
(3:24) It’s four values and sometimes forgotten, the 12 principles. (3:28) Side note, I’m going to snowboard tomorrow. (3:33) So that’s pretty cool.
(3:35) That’s where these guys were creating the Agile manifesto. (3:38) So side note. (3:41) One way that you can find out, so this is a very simple measurement that you can do.
(3:46) Actually, you can do it in your head right now as a thought experiment. (3:50) I want you to imagine one team, just one team. (3:53) And I want you to imagine that you ask this team, hey, do a one pager on how we work together.
(4:01) Forget about the word Agile, just one pager, right? (4:05) So we have definition of ready, definition of done, team working agreements, stuff like that. (4:09) Generally very simple.
(4:10) Maybe they’re in confluence, maybe they’re not. (4:12) In the old days, it would be on the wall, whatever. (4:16) So ask each person independently to fill out a one pager, how do we work together?
(4:22) Now, if you collate those one pagers and they come back and they’re pretty much the same, fantastic, right? (4:29) And if you’re trying to do Agile and that comes back the same, fantastic. (4:34) But most of the time, it’s not the same.
(4:38) Because you may have a definition of ready, done, working agreement, but that doesn’t mean that it’s what people actually follow. (4:46) So there’s one measurement. (4:47) Are we even doing the same thing?
(4:49) Whether it’s Agile or not, it doesn’t really matter. (4:51) Do we all collectively have an agreement that we’re doing the same thing? (4:56) So there’s a lot of different assessment tools out there, right?
(4:59) There’s a lot of different ways to measure. (5:01) These are just some of the ones.(5:02) There’s the KMM, Kanban Maturity Model, SAFE.
(5:08) That one’s not the prettiest one that’s up there. (5:10) Not knocking it, just, you know, that’s what’s out there. (5:13) I think a lot of people that do SAFE though, if they’re going to do an assessment, they use Agility Health, for instance.
(5:19) There’s also Spotify Health Check. (5:21) There’s the Agile Fluency Model, which is maybe not as well-known or as popular these days. (5:27) We’re going to do a survey in a moment where I’d love to get your thoughts on what you use, and then you can learn from each other as well.
(5:33) And let’s see what’s out there. (5:36) On a side note, there’s three that I’ve been associated with, and it’s not really about me, but just wanted to give you some background from my perspective on measuring. (5:45) So I used to work at a company called Eliason, wonderful company still.
(5:49) But at Eliason, one of the things that I helped create was something called their maturity matrix. (5:54) It was back in 2013. (5:55) It came from Capital One.
(5:56) You may have heard of them. (5:58) Oh, the news there might not be so great from an agile perspective, but that’s kind of the third wave, right? (6:04) That was the third wave.
(6:05) They had two waves before it, but in any case. (6:08) So it was very fine-grained. (6:10) It had 80 different KPIs in it, or OKRs, or whatever the cool kids call them these days.
(6:16) So 80 is kind of a lot. (6:20) It’s really hard to get confused, for people not to follow it.(6:24) It’s wonderful from the perspective of raw data and having an understanding of what agile could be, but it was a little tedious to implement.
(6:35) So then I sort of left agile for a while. (6:38) I’d had enough. (6:39) Went away for two years, came back, right?
(6:42) Just pulled me back in. (6:44) I realized I missed it. (6:45) So I came back.
(6:46) Came up with something called the Agile Journey, which has only four measures, and we’ll talk about one of the measures in a little bit. (6:53) And that’s cool, but then accidentally in one of the classes that was just being mentioned, I put together this exercise, which we’re going to do, which is, what is agile? (7:04) And realized that that exercise itself was a great way to co-create a vision of agile together and all be on the same page together.
(7:11) It doesn’t necessarily measure outcomes like profitability or something like that, but it’s a shared definition. (7:20) Steve, if he was to put together, this is how we should evaluate the organization, it would be awesome, but it wouldn’t necessarily be what everybody in the organization sort of signed up for or understood. (7:34) And so if somebody puts something together and they don’t have the stuff in there that Steve would put in there, it doesn’t mean that they’re wrong or that Steve’s wrong.
(7:42) It just means they’re not on the same page or there may be things that Steve knows that they don’t know. (7:47) And that’s actually good to know. (7:50) So the agile journey map is something that we’re going to look at.
(7:54) It doesn’t have measures like morale or whatever. (7:58) It’s more about what is agile, but then once you know what is agile, and yes, it’s the agile manifesto, but still perception is reality. (8:07) What is the perception of agile here?
(8:09) Then we can decide together, where are we and where would we like to go? (8:14) And anything that’s co-created is much more from a coaching perspective, more likely to be followed and understood. (8:22) So let’s do a survey because who doesn’t love a survey?
(8:26) I’ll get you the link and I will send you in there. (8:34) So there’s two things you could fill out. (8:36) At the top, there’s a, let me get the link in and then I’ll chit chat.
(8:42) So it’ll show up in the chat. (8:47) There it is. (8:48) By the way, if you go in, you don’t have to register, you don’t have to sign in.
(8:54) There’s an enter as visitor link, not a button, a link at the bottom, click that and then it will ask you again, click enter as a visitor again and you’ll be all set. (9:04) There’s two things that you can fill out. (9:06) One is at the top, what agile assessment tools are actively used in your organization?
(9:10) You can fill out multiple ones, look and see if somebody else has already filled out your favorite one so you don’t copy it. (9:15) And then down below, what non-agile specific measurements are used in your organization? (9:20) Could be like net promoter, profits, I was gonna say morals, that’s not right.
(9:29) Morale, what is it that’s measured? (9:33) The other thing is there’s an icon on the right. (9:37) Don’t use different icons.
(9:39) Pick one for yourself if you’d like to do that. (9:42) Pick one for yourself and you can copy and paste it on the ones that you use. (9:47) And don’t forget to vote for your own.
(9:51) Oh, I thought that said Scrum Adventure, Scrum Adherence Index. (9:56) That sounds very auditing, very much like an auditor, Scrum Adherence. (10:03) I’m not saying it’s bad.
(10:04) I haven’t heard of that. (10:05) That’s cool. (10:06) I’m glad I did this.
(10:08) Path to agility. (10:09) Oh, I forgot about that. (10:13) Internally developed assessment is up there.
(10:16) None, okay. (10:18) There’s two nones. (10:19) There’s a capital none, like really none.
(10:21) And then there’s a lowercase none, sort of none. (10:29) All right, so we’re not gonna spend too much time on this. (10:34) And actually let me share it so we get it in the recording.
(10:43) First of all, you know what? (10:44) I think I better turn off all those cursors. (10:46) They’re a little crazy.
(10:52) That’s much better, don’t you think? (10:57) So let’s see if there’s something in particular that we’d like to look at here. (11:02) A lot of folks are using none.
(11:05) And capital none won that battle, that standards war. (11:11) Nada, okay. (11:15) All caps, none won that one.
(11:18) It looks like all caps, none is the main assessment tool here. (11:23) Well, that really goes to my original point, which is, is Agile dead where we’re using none? (11:28) How would we know?
(11:30) Is it succeeding? (11:31) How would we know? (11:33) We don’t know.
(11:37) And the other thing that you can look at here and maybe take a screenshot of to show somebody else is there are others out there and people are using them. (11:49) All right, what other non Agile specific? (11:51) Pulse survey, commit to complete MPS.
(11:55) Dora, oh yeah, that’s one I recently heard about. (11:57) I had not heard about that.(11:59) That is a DevOps one, very cool.
(12:02) Site analytics, are people coming to our website? (12:05) Okay, awesome, all right.(12:14) So this will be in the recording and it’s right here if you wanna take a screenshot as well.
(12:21) Maybe this will give you some ideas. (12:23) All right, let’s continue on. (12:25) Thank you so much for doing the survey.
(12:31) We’re gonna do another activity right away, almost forgot. (12:37) All right, so let me get that ready. (12:41) This is kind of an assessment tool.
(12:44) It’s really measuring, are we doing what we understand and what is it we understand?(12:52) So it’s really good for do-it-yourself. (12:54) One issue with do-it-yourself assessment tools is if you let people self-assess and they don’t really know what they’re assessing, they’re gonna give themselves eights, nines and tens.
(13:05) And then when you go and say, oh no, actually it’s fours, fives and sixes, they’re not gonna listen, right? (13:11) So we wanna have a common understanding of what that means.(13:14) So I’m gonna show you this tool.
(13:16) And like I said, this came about in class as just a in-class various coaches having a conversation together about what Agile means. (13:24) And then somebody called me up and they said, oh, I love that assessment tool. (13:27) I said, what assessment tool?
(13:29) And they described this one. (13:31) It’s like, this is an, oh, what a great idea. (13:35) So this has kind of nine quadrants, but you can think of them as three different spectrums.
(13:41) On the left, it says traditional organization. (13:43) One thing to know about this is sometimes people don’t like being, they say, well, just cause we’re doing the things on the right doesn’t mean you can’t do it in a traditional organization. (13:51) Agile is not the way to go.
(13:53) They have that whole conversation, whatever. (13:55) So be aware. (13:56) But at the top, we have organizational stuff.
(14:01) In the middle, we have team. (14:03) And then we have individual. (14:05) I’m giving you examples here.
(14:06) What I want from you is your thoughts, right? (14:09) We’re gonna co-create together our definition of this group’s definition of agile. (14:15) It doesn’t mean it’s right.
(14:16) It doesn’t mean it’s wrong. (14:17) It’s just our shared understanding. (14:20) So if you talk to an individual in an organization and they say, my, my, my, my, my, me, me, me, me, me, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, that person may or may not be an agile person, but they’re certainly not in an agile environment.
(14:32) If on the other hand, you talk to that same person or a different person in an organization and they keep saying our, the teams, the stuff for this sprint, what we’re gonna do together, what I’m working on with Darren. (14:48) Well, probably that’s a good indicator that they’re agile thinking and on agile team. (14:53) It’s not a guarantee, but it’s one indicator, right?
(14:56) No one indicator will do it. (14:58) And in the middle, they’re helping other people.(15:00) You can help other people in a traditional organization.
(15:02) That’s fantastic. (15:03) But I would argue that’s an indicator that that particular part of the organization and that person has more agile mindset. (15:11) At the team level, for example, so we can have, you talk to different people and they say, oh, we’re all on this team.
(15:17) What do you do? (15:17) I’m in QA, what do you do? (15:18) QA, QA, QA, QA, QA.
(15:21) I’m sorry, that’s not a team, that’s a group. (15:24) That’s a group of QA people in a silo, probably not in an actual silo. (15:29) Working in sprints means absolutely nothing.
(15:32) Really, it means nothing, but at least they’re on their path. (15:38) You ask people, what are you doing? (15:40) What are you doing?
(15:40) What are you doing? (15:41) Developer, QA, BA, UX person, manager, product, coach, blah, blah, blah. (15:46) Oh, that sounds very cross-functional.
(15:48) There’s a good chance that they’re more agile than otherwise. (15:51) Actually, cross-functional is a very good indicator. (15:54) It’s not a guarantee, but there’s a good indicator.
(15:58) At the organizational level, yearly funding. (16:02) If an organization is doing yearly funding and they’re doing sprints, hmm, yeah, not a lot of agile actually going on there anyway. (16:12) Quarterly funding, better, the ultimate.
(16:15) And by the way, it’s easy for me to say these things. (16:17) I’m saying them. (16:18) Look, I said them, it was easy.
(16:20) Doing them, hard. (16:22) And if I’m, you know, me describing this doesn’t mean that I just go into an organization. (16:27) Voila, you know, it’s hard.
(16:31) Anyway, funding by value stream. (16:33) We don’t approve things on a quarterly basis. (16:36) What we do is we say these product people for these teams, that’s our investment.
(16:41) You go make the investment worth money. (16:43) You do whatever you want. (16:46) Funding by value stream.
(16:47) Not a lot of organizations do that. (16:49) More do it, you know, these days. (16:51) Still not a lot, super agile.
(16:53) So those are the kinds of things I’m looking for from you. (16:56) I want specific behaviors that would be hard to fake. (16:59) You can’t fake any of these.
(17:02) All right, you’re either in a silo or you’re not. (17:04) You’re either in a cross-functional team or not. (17:05) You’re either funding by value stream or you’re not.
(17:08) All right, so I want to get your ideas. (17:10) So let me send you in there. (17:13) What would be examples of more on the left, more on the right, more in the middle, at the different levels that agility is happening there?
(17:24) All right, so what, basically, what would you look for? (17:27) How would you know this organization or that organization? (17:30) And they’re both trying to fool you.
(17:32) How would you know? (17:36) That’s awful. (17:37) They’re both trying to fool you.
(17:40) That said, you know, I remember going into one organization and I said, I only need two days to talk to a few people to get an idea of where to go. (17:48) And I said, but your competitor said six weeks. (17:50) And I said, oh, really, why should it be so long?
(17:53) Well, what if people are trying to fool you? (17:55) They’re not going to be. (17:57) If they can fool me, that’s great.
(17:59) That means they know what to do and they’re probably doing it. (18:05) All right, let me turn off all of those indicators again. (18:16) If you see a lot of stickies in one area, you might go work in another area.
(18:22) And let’s not do any ping pong. (18:23) If somebody has put a sticky over on the left and you think it belongs on the right, if you put it on the right, they’re going to put it back on the left. (18:30) So let’s just leave it wherever it is.
(18:32) It’s okay. (18:33) This is not going to be graded. (18:35) As far as I know, I think that’s true.
(18:37) Maybe Sharon, I don’t know, Sharon, sometimes she grades these things. (18:44) All right, and let me share for those at home. (18:51) See what we got here.
(18:54) Poor communications. (18:57) Nobody knows what I’m working on. (19:00) And I still get paid.
(19:02) Actually, maybe that’s a good thing. (19:04) I don’t know. (19:05) People, mentorship is important.
(19:07) Okay, it’s an indicator. (19:08) It’s not necessarily all the way. (19:11) Friendly outside work.
(19:15) Celebrating our cross-functional team’s progress and success. (19:18) Right, so it’s not just Guy or Guy. (19:22) It’s not just Sorucci.
(19:23) It’s Guy and Sorucci celebrating together. (19:27) Sorry, I don’t know which one it is, Guy or Guy. (19:31) People recruit their friends to work there.
(19:33) Oh, right, so there’s a lot of overlap in people’s thinking between this is a great place to work and Agile. (19:40) Interesting. (19:44) Shipping on demand.
(19:46) All right, so I love it when people say Agile is dead and they ship like every six months. (19:51) That’s really, I love that. (19:54) Well, maybe Agile died there.
(20:00) We have deployed to production. (20:02) Focus on the team’s performance. (20:05) Right, so people could interpret that in different ways.
(20:08) I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it. (20:09) The part of that I’m going to take is that there’s a focus on the team performing as a team versus individuals. (20:19) Outcome-based sprint goal, right?
(20:21) Outcome as opposed to the other word, which I can never remember. (20:26) Outputs, that’s it. (20:27) Outputs, outcome versus outputs.
(20:32) Ability to check in multiple repositories. (20:39) Wow, that’s, by the way, I’m a version control geek. (20:42) So I love that one.
(20:44) Just didn’t expect to see it there. (20:47) All right, so at the organizational level, we’ve got decentralized decision-making, value delivery oriented, focused on the team’s performance. (20:56) And okay, so it looks like that one got copied and pasted in a few places.
(20:59) It’s great, you can show up at the team or the organizational level. (21:06) All right, so we have a lot of stuff. (21:11) I remember doing this once with a group of 20 folks that had been sent to me internal to an organization as scrum masters.
(21:22) And there wasn’t so many stickies, right? (21:25) Wonderful people. (21:26) But what that showed me is they weren’t actually scrum masters.
(21:29) They were, as it turns out, looking into it deeper, they were doing scrum mastering on the side of their desk, right? (21:35) They had been appointed, they didn’t really get training.(21:38) They were scheduling the meetings and operating JIRA, yikes.
(21:44) So that was really eye-opening, not only for me, but it was eye-opening for them.(21:51) Okay, so there’s a couple of different ways that you could use this tool. (21:56) One of which is, and I’m not gonna ask you to do this next, is you could then vote on, put icons all over the place to show where do we think we are?
(22:05) And you can see some people think we’re over here, some people think we’re over there. (22:09) And then the other way you could use it is vote on what you think we should do next, right? (22:13) So if that’s where we are, where should we focus next?
(22:16) And if you’ve got your team doing this or the organization doing it instead of you personally, this can be great. (22:23) It’s learning for everybody, right? (22:25) Everybody’s involved, everybody has a say.
(22:28) This is another way to measure where we are. (22:31) And one of the things that can be really eye-opening, especially for leadership doing this, is the watermelon. (22:39) That was very random.
(22:40) All of a sudden we had a watermelon there. (22:42) No, where this can be really eye-opening is I had no idea there was so much more we could be doing. (22:49) And I also didn’t realize at the organizational level, maybe we’re not doing so much of that.
(22:58) Maybe it’s not just the teams. (23:00) Maybe I as a leader need to do something different. (23:03) I didn’t realize that.
(23:05) All right, so one of the things we do as a coach is act as a mirror for individuals, teams, and organizations. (23:12) And this is a great way to provide a mirror for people.(23:20) Is it possible Agile isn’t dead, but we’re just exhausted?
(23:23) Well, that’s, you know, earlier I said I left Agile for a couple of years, that was why.(23:29) But yes, I think that is definitely part of it. (23:33) Okay, well, let’s see what’s next.
(23:37) I’m gonna, you know, you’ve probably heard of this thing called measures that matter.(23:42) I’m not a huge measures that matter person, but I love that phrase. (23:47) And I think it’s an awesome idea.
(23:49) What are the measures that actually measure? (23:51) What are the measures that actually matter? (23:53) So I have been in the Agile space for 18 years.
(23:57) And as part of my background, I interacted with so many coaches. (24:04) I was helping place, train, mentor, all that kind of stuff for so many years. (24:11) So I’ve interacted with, learned from literally thousands of coaches and scrum masters.
(24:16) And I’m not saying I know it all. (24:18) Absolutely not saying I know it all. (24:19) If you’ve been to any of my classes, you’ll hear me say, most of the time I’m gonna tell you, I don’t know.
(24:25) Because it depends. (24:27) But anyway, out of all that time interacting with all those people, the two things that keep coming back to me is that there’s only two measures that really matter. (24:37) Just two, people and profits.
(24:40) That’s it. (24:42) If you’re making your people happier, and I’m gonna give you the secret to making every developer, actually every person in the company happy. (24:48) Are you ready?
(24:49) No extra charge. (24:51) Give them one year of vacation every year. (24:57) Now, if you’re not chuckling, I’m not sure you heard that.
(25:00) You give them one year of vacation every year, everybody will be happy. (25:06) Obviously that’s not possible. (25:11) So making people happy is important.
(25:14) Why? (25:15) Sometimes people say, oh, fun at work. (25:17) Well, it’s work.
(25:18) It’s a four letter word for a reason. (25:20) Really? (25:22) That’s interesting.
(25:23) We’ll look a little bit more into that in a moment. (25:25) But if you’ve got people that are happy, that’s probably, I don’t mean that they just laughed at a joke, but they’re feeling fulfilled. (25:31) I feel fulfilled here.
(25:33) It probably means you’re getting the best value out of them. (25:36) And that’s a good thing for everybody. (25:38) The other thing is profits, right?
(25:40) So if you’re doing a year of vacation every year, you’re not gonna get much profit.(25:44) So if everybody’s happy, but you don’t have profits, that’s not sustainable. (25:50) You need both simultaneously, people and profits.
(25:54) And you can measure profits. (25:55) It can be hard to connect agility to profits.(26:00) But it is something to look at.
(26:03) It’s very important. (26:03) And I’m gonna give you a way very quickly here to see how you can impact that. (26:10) Not necessarily a direct impact, but how you can impact that.
(26:15) So we’re gonna start with the people first. (26:17) I’m gonna give you a measure that is one of my absolute favorite tools. (26:20) I use it all the time with everybody.
(26:22) It’s the first thing. (26:24) It doesn’t matter if they’re agile or not, where they are on their journey. (26:27) It’s called Team of the Best Results Ever.
(26:30) I created an Excel version of this just for you. (26:33) You’re welcome. (26:35) So here’s what I want you to think about.
(26:37) Forget about agile. (26:38) Forget about work. (26:41) I want you to think about your family, your friends, associations you’ve been part of, a volleyball team.
(26:48) I want you to think about when you were in college or high school or elementary school, what was the team you were on, work or not? (26:56) Include things outside of work.(26:57) For many people, it’s outside of work.
(26:58) The team you were on over your entire life that had the best results ever. (27:05) I don’t care if it was dolphins saved, charity dollars raised, right? (27:10) It’s a little bit of apples and pineapples.
(27:12) I understand that. (27:13) But think, that team really had it together. (27:16) They had the best results of any team.
(27:18) Not your favorite team. (27:21) It’s very intentionally labeled the team of the best results ever. (27:27) I want you to think of that team.
(27:34) Now, just in the chat, just for fun. (27:37) It’s just the emotions that you felt as you’re thinking about the team. (27:40) What are the emotions?
(27:41) Not the characteristics of the team. (27:43) Forget about that. (27:44) What are the emotions that you’re feeling right now thinking about that team of the best results ever?
(27:47) Go ahead and put your thoughts in the chat. (27:49) Let’s see what we get. (28:01) Proud.
(28:02) Camaraderie. (28:03) Proud. (28:04) Best version of me.
(28:05) Pride, contentment, satisfaction, learning, fulfilled, high energy. (28:09) I miss them.(28:11) There’s no tear there, but we could probably put one on there.
(28:17) Ah, it’s too much work. (28:18) Oh, there it is. (28:19) Deep personal connections.
(28:21) Sense of achievement. (28:23) Yeah. (28:25) Best results.
(28:27) Happiest you. (28:28) They’re very connected. (28:30) Let’s dive in and get a little bit more on that.
(28:33) Now, for this exercise, it’s important that you think of the team of the best results ever. (28:37) That one and one and only team. (28:40) And I want you to think of what do you think were the characteristics that made that team the team of the best results ever?
(28:46) And as you vote for the characteristics, those characteristics have to be ones that were on that one and only team. (28:52) Not characteristics you believe in in general, but were specifically true on that team. (28:59) All right, so start thinking about that as I get this ready.
(29:15) All right, so pick an icon, copy and paste it. (29:19) You can vote for as many of these as possible as you want, but it has to be something that was true on that one team of the best results ever. (29:27) And you can only vote once for any given thing.
(29:32) There’s also four attributes at the bottom. (29:35) So if you’re thinking of an attribute that I didn’t put on there, go ahead and add it in and you can vote for that as well.
Speaker 3
(29:56) Hey, Damon, do you mind sharing? (29:57) Because I don’t have the ability to chat.(30:00) My company blocks it so I can’t get to the murals.
Speaker 1
(30:04) I am so sorry to hear that.
Speaker 3
(30:10) Thank you.
Speaker 1
(30:20) It’s also good for the recording. (30:21) So thank you. (30:23) Thank you for multiple reasons.
(30:27) Thank you for being you. (30:29) Thank you for being here. (31:01) Somebody asked to re-share the link.
(31:03) I just re-shared the link. (31:12) Okay, we have 95 people here. (31:17) I’m hoping to see 20 separate icons in at least one of these.
(31:25) If you happen to be audio only, could be. (31:31) I’m going to read out the ones that are getting the most votes. (31:35) Trust, joy, fun, humor, respect, focus, clear mission, goals, and or purpose.
(31:47) Collaborative, transparency, empowerment. (31:52) Everyone’s ideas were considered.(31:54) Relationships.
(31:59) Ah, cheered for one another. (32:01) It was a baseball team. (32:04) Oh, somebody already put that in as an attribute.
(32:07) Awesome. (32:09) Team knew each other beyond work. (32:12) I’m just reading things that were added now.
(32:19) All right, so I’m going to zoom out. (32:26) And what you’ll see is this, and I’ve run this hundreds of times with thousands of people and dozens of organizations. (32:35) And it always comes up kind of like this.
(32:38) One of the conclusions that people have in looking at this is, oh, there’s no one group of characteristics that makes a great team. (32:48) That’s true, but I think a lot of that is because we haven’t intentionally worked to create those things, right? (32:57) If we intentionally worked to create those things, it would be even better.
(33:00) The other thing about this that you can’t see here, but I’m going to ask you to imagine is, remember I said I’ve run it hundreds of times with thousands of people. (33:09) And think of all of these as darts on a dartboard. (33:12) You’re looking at the bullseye.
(33:16) The things outside of this are the wrong things. (33:21) Because these collectively are the things that are on the teams of the best results ever. (33:30) So one of the things, I wouldn’t say this to a leader directly, but you can be thinking it and use this information that these are the characteristics of successful teams.
(33:42) And remember, I asked you, teams with the best results ever. (33:46) So by definition, these are the things for the team with the best results ever. (33:51) Now you can’t tell people to have fun, but if they’re not having fun, I can guarantee you they are not a team with the best results ever.
(34:00) Guaranteed. (34:01) So this is a way to measure, you can do morale surveys and all that, and that’s fantastic. (34:08) But have a team do this, have an organization do this, and then as a follow-up, ask them, how many of these characteristics are on your team today?
(34:21) I’ll warn you that running this with a leadership group can be hazardous to your health. (34:25) All right, so before running this with a leadership team, make sure that they’re ready to have their eyes very open. (34:33) And they want to see these things.
(34:35) Because if you look at this and compare it to your current teams, very often they don’t match up. (34:41) And those things that they’re doing that aren’t in line with this, they’re kind of just wrong, right? (34:48) And you say, oh, well, we have to do it for this reason.
(34:50) Oh, really? (34:51) Are you trying to make the most mediocre team ever? (34:53) I thought you were trying to make the team with the best results ever.
(34:55) Again, I would not use that wording. (35:00) But you can rely on the fact that this is a very accurate way to find out what is the team with the best results ever. (35:08) All right, so that’s another measurement.
(35:10) It’s one of my favorite ones. (35:17) So now we’re going to move to money. (35:21) I know this is kind of cringy, right?
(35:24) Oh, let’s talk about money. (35:26) Let’s measure profits. (35:28) Well, Damon, don’t you care about people?
(35:29) Yes, I just showed you I care about people. (35:32) Caring about people is fantastic.(35:34) But without the profits, you can’t care about people for very long, right?
(35:41) Would it be okay if I asked you to downgrade your house or move from a car to a bicycle? (35:48) No, you don’t want to do that. (35:50) You want a paycheck, right?
(35:52) It’s how you measure, am I doing well? (35:56) It’s one of the ways, am I doing well?(35:58) Am I going to be able to provide for my family, et cetera?
(36:00) So it makes sense to use the same thinking with an organization. (36:04) Is the organization healthy or not? (36:08) So one of the things traditional organizations look at, and I understand that, is the IT budget and R&D budget.
(36:16) Yes, they look at other things. (36:17) They look at profits, but it’s the business side looking at that and the IT or R&D side looking at their budgets independently. (36:26) So if you focus on the budget, the cost of developing something, what can they do?
(36:35) The only thing you can do to improve is reduce this to zero. (36:39) And then you’ll save a lot of money, but pretty soon you’ll be out of business. (36:43) So focusing on efficiency over here is actually not a good idea.
(36:47) Developer efficiency, it doesn’t matter. (36:51) Market, business efficiency is what’s important. (36:54) Now, I’m not saying it’s not important, but either you’ve got people that are working hard or you don’t.
(37:01) I’m going to guess that you do. (37:02) If you don’t, that’s a different problem in a different presentation. (37:06) Computer economics says for IT, right?
(37:10) So some people say IT, some people say R&D. (37:12) You’ll know which one you are.(37:14) 1.4 to 5.9% of revenues. (37:18) R&D budgets for software companies are larger, 20 to 40%. (37:22) This is showing an average of 30%. (37:26) However, revenues is where you want to focus.
(37:29) That is the important thing, really profits. (37:31) Instead of thinking about reducing costs, which my perspective, worthless. (37:38) Instead, you want to be looking at building and maintaining morale, which we’ve been talking about, maximizing value, all these fantastic things.
(37:45) That’s where to focus if you want the profits. (37:48) And I’m going to show you why in the connection to Agile. (37:52) This is a little bit of a complicated slide.
(37:55) Bear with me. (37:56) This is under development. (37:57) I’ve been moving my focus from Agile specific to this message of people and profits, profits with an F.
(38:05) So at some point, your organization, and I want you to think of a project within your organization or a recent organization you were at, where they discovered something of high value. (38:18) And it turns out it was the highest value thing for the organization to do. (38:22) Yes, they already had things in progress, but they’re like, oh my God, we need to develop software for the Apple Vision Pro.
(38:28) Okay, that’s probably not at the top of anybody’s list. (38:31) But for example, right?(38:32) Apple Vision comes out and it’s like, oh, it’s got a lot of buzz, whatever it is.
(38:37) There’s a time where you discover it. (38:38) And now imagine you put all hands on deck, not too many people, maybe a small team of 10 people. (38:44) And you said, the only thing you’re gonna work on is this cool thing of high value, whatever it is.
(38:51) You have something in your mind. (38:53) You either just did it or it’s something that the company’s working on now or should be working on now. (38:58) How long would it take to do the MVP of that?
(39:02) All hands on deck. (39:04) It gets greenlit, expedited. (39:07) How long would that take?
(39:08) Let’s say it’s a month, right? (39:10) So from discovery to shortest time for delivery, the measure I wanna introduce you to, people will say, hey, Damon, no, this is a lead time or cycle time. (39:21) No, it’s not, right?
(39:22) Cause that’s a general thing. (39:24) I want you to think of the thing of highest value, just that one thing. (39:27) If it helps to think in lean terms, that’s fine cause it’s very similar.
(39:31) One way you could do this is in a traditional organization, there’s gonna be a delay.(39:36) And then we’re not only gonna work on that high value thing, we’re gonna work on a whole bunch of other stuff too. (39:41) And when you start benefiting from this is actually a year delay over what it could be.
(39:47) You can measure this. (39:48) And what I’m saying is, I think this is the most important measure in your company other than the morale. (39:55) This thing right here.
(39:59) People say, oh, we already do that. (40:00) I value it, we put all hands on deck. (40:03) After a delay.
(40:05) I mean, not from when the product owner discovers it, not from when the team has it in their backlog, from when somebody in the organization at any place realizes this is the most important thing. (40:18) And for many people in development, it’s a shock to understand that the thing that they’re working on now was discovered a year ago. (40:26) Not just recently, a long time ago.
(40:31) So this is cool, but it’s still one, two, three, four, five months later than it could be.(40:38) There’s another possibility. (40:39) There’s another possibility.
(40:41) And then the final possibility that I want to introduce you to is the number zero.(40:47) The amount of time it was delayed between when it was discovered and the shortest time it could have been done is zero. (40:55) Because as soon as it was discovered, all hands on deck.
(40:58) And you might say that that’s ideal, but you can’t get better than zero unless you get a time machine where you can predict the future. (41:05) This measure is important because the longer it is between discovery and delivery, the more money you’re wasting. (41:15) And I mean millions, if not multiple millions, tens of millions of dollars, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, depending on the size of your revenues.
(41:25) That’s a lot of money. (41:28) It’s definitely gonna be millions. (41:30) It could be tens or hundreds of millions.
(41:32) It’s a lot. (41:36) So this won’t tell you how much money, but the longer this is, the more money you’re wasting, leaving on the table. (41:45) So I’m gonna give you a way to look at this.
(41:47) I’ve made up numbers for this and you could argue that the timelines on here could be changed, but it scales with the math. (41:54) You could put in your own numbers. (41:56) To get these numbers though, you’ll have to talk to somebody on the business side.
(42:00) And that’s actually one of my important messages is that if you want to connect the value of agile with people investing in it, you gotta talk to the money people. (42:12) Now that might not be you, but maybe you can find somebody or at least get the message out there.(42:18) All right, so let’s say a hypothetical organization has greenlit four initiatives and cost for a given amount of effort can be accurately predicted.
(42:29) We know how much this team costs. (42:31) This is a team of 10 people fully loaded for a year. (42:33) It’s a one and a half million dollar investment.
(42:35) Might be a little bit more, a little bit less in your organization, but that’s generally what it is. (42:39) They’ve been assigned these four initiatives and you might say, we don’t have initiatives that take a year. (42:44) I mean, end to end, from the time it was discovered until the time it was delivered.
(42:49) And if your timelines are shorter, awesome. (42:52) But the same math applies.(42:54) So they got these four initiatives.
(42:57) We don’t know what the actual revenues will be, but hopefully if you’re working on it, you think there’s a good chance of making money. (43:03) Otherwise, stop. (43:07) However it is that you forecast revenues, you’re gonna use that.
(43:10) I don’t know what it is. (43:11) Hopefully your organization has one. (43:13) If it doesn’t, I don’t know what it’s doing.
(43:18) All right, step number one, stop working on multiple things at the same time. (43:23) I know that’s a message. (43:24) We talk about work in progress limits all the time.
(43:26) I get it. (43:27) But unless it’s connected to money, nobody else is gonna get it on the business side. (43:31) It has to be connected to money.
(43:33) So we get these four initiatives. (43:35) We’re gonna do them one at a time. (43:37) And absolutely in reality, there’s gonna be a chance that you can’t just work on one.
(43:41) I get it. (43:42) And if it’s just, we don’t do it that way, well, today. (43:46) Use the word today, yet, currently.
(43:48) We don’t do it today, yet, or currently. (43:50) Anyway, you could. (43:52) However many initiatives it is, and I’m just using one team to make it simple, reduce it to as few as possible.
(43:57) And as an example, I’m reducing it to one. (44:00) So by doing that, you’re gonna get, let’s imagine that the total for this was 160K, right? (44:08) I think that was on the previous slide.
(44:09) Yeah, so you’re assuming you’re gonna get 160K per month of new revenue after all these are delivered. (44:14) You’re not gonna get revenue right away, but it makes the math easier, right? (44:19) Okay, so first initiative, since it’s one of the four, you’re only gonna get 40K.
(44:25) But you’re gonna get it for all that time. (44:27) And if you add this up, how much extra money you’re gonna get? (44:30) Just by limiting work in progress in this example, $720,000.
(44:34) But wait, you also get, no, you don’t get any Ginsu knives. (44:39) But let’s look at this again. (44:42) Any one given initiative, if you look at it and break it into a backlog and small user stories, you could estimate at what point are you getting, what’s the gold in this backlog?
(44:55) So let’s say we break it up into the gold, the silver and the dirt, the stuff that I don’t know why, I don’t know why we would do it. (45:04) Actually on reflection, we probably shouldn’t because if it’s at the bottom of the backlog, we might as well work on something else, somewhere else that has more value. (45:14) So let’s say we break it up into these chunks.
(45:17) Break it up however you like, use your own numbers. (45:21) All right, so we do this for all the initiatives. (45:24) Obviously we’re gonna get rid of the junk.
(45:26) All right, and then that gives us room for more initiatives, which we break up the same way. (45:33) We add up the extra money we’re gonna make this way. (45:38) Now it’s $1.5 million. (45:40) Just by doing that, we paid for the team. (45:50) So how you can use this is work with the business to find out how much per initiative you’re looking to make over what period of time, slice it up this way. (46:00) And then you can work with a numbers person with Excel or whatever, CFO, controller, somebody over on the financial business side.
(46:12) They can show themselves how much more money they’ll make if they start working on smaller things end to end of higher value and stop doing this crazy greenlighting approval process. (46:30) It’s crazy. (46:36) So here’s a real example.
(46:37) This is a little older. (46:38) This is in terms of quarters. (46:40) This was 10 years ago.
(46:41) And what we were looking to achieve was much smaller. (46:46) So this was from a financial organization. (46:49) They were doing payment processing with American Express.
(46:52) And as soon as they could bring this online, they would start making fractions of a penny on each transaction. (46:58) But times a couple million, it added up really fast. (47:01) So what they calculated was that they were gonna make 250K per quarter as soon as this rolled out.
(47:07) Their original plan was it was gonna take from the business idea to the full rollout a year. (47:13) If they had, and I caught them kind of late in this, so they didn’t get the full value here. (47:17) But if they had been following this, and this was not even as aggressive as it could have been, right?
(47:23) So I’m sorry, that was 12 quarters, right? (47:25) So it’s a little bit longer. (47:26) It’s like a three-year thing.
(47:28) Anyway, the point of all of this is that if they had been using this thinking 10 years ago with a little bit less aggressive, it would have been 2.25 million upside for them. (47:39) And why am I using a 10-year-old thing? (47:42) Because I haven’t really been focusing on this until recently, right?
(47:46) Until recently, Agile was kind of flying off the shelves. (47:50) So now I’m moving my message more to this, right? (47:54) And so I’ll have new examples soon, but I don’t have one at the moment.
(47:58) All right, so the last thing that I wanna show you is a really incredible tool. (48:04) Maybe you use it, but if you are not using value stream mapping, it’s a must. (48:11) So we’re not gonna do this as an exercise.
(48:13) I’m just gonna show you the result of one. (48:17) So I did this with a large group across a whole bunch of different companies. (48:23) And I’m just gonna zoom in on five of them.
(48:32) Oh, this person didn’t fill in the times here, but… (48:36) Okay, so the question is, at the time you have a great idea, and it should be the thing, highest value that the company starts working on immediately, what actually happened? (48:48) So they put out all the different things, strategy, detail, brief, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
(48:57) So that took them 16 months start to finish. (49:01) And the question was, if you assigned a team to work on that, and that only immediately, what would be the elapsed time? (49:09) Five months.
(49:11) So the result is 20 weeks versus 64. (49:14) That means 44 extra weeks of the most money they could possibly make. (49:20) Yes, it displaces something else, but it displaces something else of lesser value.
(49:27) So just looking at this five random people in this column that I picked, 12 weeks versus this one is really crazy. (49:36) I even put a little reason why. (49:37) This is the reason why.
(49:39) Continual rescoping because the hippos were making the decisions versus their customers, and they just wouldn’t release it. (49:48) I’m sure you’ve never seen that. (49:54) A couple more examples, and then we’ll pause or stop, I guess.
(49:59) Three weeks versus 60, six weeks versus 154, two weeks versus 24. (50:07) So lean value stream mapping. (50:10) That’s what I’m saying.
(50:11) That’s another measure, and that’s a way that you can see, how are you doing? (50:16) And if it turns out like any of these, it’s not so good. (50:20) And there’s a lot of room for improvement.
(50:22) Some people might say, oh, that’s lean, lean, agile, whatever. (50:26) The question is, are you working on small things of high value and getting them out there as soon as you possibly can? (50:33) That is totally measurable.
(50:35) Okay, thank you so much. (50:37) That’s what I wanted to present today. (50:44) Thank you.