In this poster, I have collected some organizational design patterns from Agile product organizations at scale. The highlighted questions might serve as an entry point to different topics, such as design principles for the organization, strategy for growing teams and individuals, how to enable autonomy and alignment and how to design the leadership teams to support and grow an awesome product organization that delivers products customers love.
UPDATE JUNE 2023: Scrum of Scrum added as a pattern in the English poster.
“On the Cover” is a great exercise to define the vision for a product, service, company… you name it!
Use it with your team to define your vision. If you create one each you can then share your thoughts with each other. It might just be valuable to see if you are aligned with eachother on the big picture, but you can also create one picture together and build on what you all shared and find the next level together.
If you are far away from each other on important topics, talk about why and what that means. It is valuable to get a shared vision to be able to know if we are doing the right things and to engage the team.
Ever wondered what the business impact would be of delivering continuously in small batches instead of everything in a big bang? Watch this video and reflect if you could benefit from delivering in an Agile way.
This video is produced as a part of our custom-made training materials in Dandy People Academy.
I dag stod det klart att Karin Hagren är vinnaren av Stora Ingenjörspriset i Ledarskap. Vi vill gratulera Karin till detta fina ledarskapspris och samtidigt passa på att välkomna Karin till Dandy People! Karin är i dag Agile Director på King och kommer att börja som Agil Enterprise Coach hos oss på Dandy People i Augusti. Vi ser med tillförsikt fram emot att få lära av Karin och jobba tillsammans hos våra fantastiska kunder.
Utdrag ur pressmeddelandet på My Newsdesk
“Det känns jättestort att vinna! Jag brinner för ledarskap och har gjort det i hela mitt yrkesliv, så det känns fantastiskt att bli nominerad av mina medarbetare och sedan vinna, det känns helt grymt! Det är genom ledarskap man får saker att hända och det handlar om att få alla att vilja vara med och lyckas tillsammans”, säger Karin om att motta priset.
Juryns motivering Mottagaren av priset utövar ett ledarskap som visar vägen och möjligheter och är utforskande och sökande istället för dikterande och styrande. Vinnaren är en nyfiken ledare med stor erfarenhet av arbete i internationell kontext. Hon är både strukturerad och pragmatisk samtidigt som hon är en kulturbärare av rang. Vinnaren har skapat en miljö för aktivt lärande och visar stor öppenhet för förändring. Hon leder geografiskt utspridda personer och team, drar dagligen nytta av sin ingenjörsbakgrund och har fokus inställt på det agila arbetssättet.
When working in Agile teams, we want the teams to do usability testing to get quick feedback. This is the most efficient way to make sure we are building the right thing. The Test Canvas can be used to speed up the feedback process and enable more people to learn how to do it and join the process.
This canvas is created based on UX professionals practices and guide anyone through the process in a safe way as well as minimize the time to define and conduct usability testing on a continuous basis – it is perfect for building and scaling the UX capability in many product teams.
Usability testing is qualitative as opposed to a quantitative method
The purpose of usability testing is to observe users and how they solve common user tasks in a prototype or existing service to see if the solution is working well. We want them to talk out loud so we can understand how they think when they use it. We want to be able to ask them questions so we can better understand their mental models and experience. Since it is a qualitative test where we listen to and look at how users behave and how our service performed it is usually enough to test with 5-8 people. Once you realize nothing new “big” is coming from the tests you know you have reached the limit for what is needed now. But once you have fixed those issues you might test again on new people. You find more information about this in the canvas.
Usability testing can be done on anyone and any user type
Usability testing can be done on anyone and any user type. A user interview on the other hand is something else, that is when we need to learn if the solution solves a specific problem. In that case, we need to validate that on the target group and perhaps someone who is like our users and a specific persona. Often we then need to interview or observe 20 people instead of only 5-8.
Usability testing can be scary at the beginning
Meeting with customers and doing usability testing, in the beginning, can be intimidating. A good way to get started is by creating a safe-to-fail environment by practicing with people you know. Remember, if the team can test on real users once in a while and get valuable feedback, it is so much better than never getting to meet with any users and never getting any validation on what they do. It is also a lot better than only having experts outside of the team, or even worse outside of the organization.
February 2021 was an amazing month for the evolution of agility. As a celebration of the 20th birthday of the Agile Manifesto, there was a month-long, worldwide, free, virtual festival, started by Scott Seivwright. It was open to anyone to join in as a participant and speaker or to host any kind of virtual event, and it was totally self-managed and co-hosted by ambassadors across the world.
I was honored to be the Swedish ambassador
Together with my team at Dandy People, and particularly Patrik Ekstrand who worked full time on this, we supported people to set up talks and events and promote them to the audience. A really big thank you to all the great speakers and everyone who joined in making new friends, building relations, and shared learnings! We are already looking forward to the 2022 event 🙂
The product development process is the end to end process we go through to make sure we build the right thing. As a Product Manager or Product Owner, your job is to lead this process, or parts of it, together with your team.
The process looks the same no matter if you are working in an environment or product with legacy systems or a totally new product. This could be a waterfall, step-by-step process if you are in a slow-paced environment where not much is changing over the time it takes to think, build and ship it, but most often we need it to be more of a fluid process where we can go through it in different ways, with different methods depending on the need. We often want to get from start to end as quickly as possible to not just get quick feedback from stakeholders but also from real users to make sure we build the right thing and solve real customer problems.
The keys to building the right thing lay both in defining the right problems in connection to your business goals and finding the solution to solve the problem. When we work Agile we need to get quick feedback along the way and adapt the solution as we go, and we do that by embedding feedback loops into the process. As you can see above the process the feedback you get in the different parts of the process should help you either move forward or go back to re-iterate your assumption or solution, this is what we call Lean UX and Lean Startup depending on what we are building.
In this chapter we will look at the different parts of the process and what methods can be used to be able to deliver in an Agile way, to get customer feedback, and to involve the stakeholders, team, and customer in a good way along the process.
A couple of things to reflect on:
– Where are you in the process now? – Do you do work in all parts of the process? – Do you, or the teams, often jump directly into planning? – Is someone else doing part of the process, or is no one doing it? – Do you and the team evaluate and optimize what you ship?
This poster with the overview of the product development process can be used for discussing your current ways of working, and as support for anyone to move from traditional ways of working with product development and product management. It can also act as a great support in planning how to work in the team together, and to create a high-level plan when starting some new product development.
This is a workshop that I have used a couple of times to enable shared ideas about product development with development teams. It is originally called ”Prune the Product tree”, and part of the book Innovation Games by Luke Hohmann.
Last Friday we used it with the Dandy People team to look at Dandy and what we might need to, and like to focus on and do next, and what fruits we think it might give us.
I love these kinds of workshops and formats that are visual and where we can use metaphors and get creative in our discovery and prioritization together. The full workshop was over 4 hours (and we didn’t finish).
We believe that well functioning Agile leadership teams are one of the most important functions of an Agile organization, but also one that often seems to be underdeveloped in most organization. That’s why we got together after summer and started to sketch on good practices and principles for Agile Leadership Teams.
We have collected some of our best tools and tips for cross-functional leadership teams that want to support the organization and build structures for Agility in this new poster. We are so happy to now finally be able to share the Agile Leadership Team in a Nutshell Poster with you for free!
On November 30 we hosted a webinar where we launched the poster and shared our insights and learnings from where we created the poster. You can also find the video on YouTube
This is the ninth posting in the Agile Leadership & Management Series
Leaders play an important role in Agile organizations, as they give direction to the organization, manage the structures around the Agile teams, act as sponsors, empower both teams as well as individuals and, perhaps most importantly, foster a culture of psychological safety.
In Agile organizations, a leader is responsible only in one area. Either PEOPLE, PRODUCT, TECHNOLOGY, or PROCESS. The Agile Coaches coach the people in all processes and areas to improve the value and flow continuously. This is the core of an Agile Leadership team, also for the executives.
The Agile Leadership Flower
The cross-functional Agile Leadership Team works together on moving the organization forward while working within each area supporting their people at operational and tactical as well as strategic level.
The Main Mission for the Agile Leadership Team is to improve structures and increase the outcome of the organization.
The next post in the November Agile Leadership and Management Series: “Are you really a Team?”
Sign up for the launch of the Agile Leadership Team Poster
The new Agile Leadership in a Nutshell poster will be released at the end of November 2020. Sign up for the free release webinar here if you want to learn more.
This is the seventh post in the November Agile Leadership and Management Series.
The Strategic Leadership Room visualizes what we are doing in the organization, what we think we should be doing, and how things are going. It is a great way to enable a shared understanding and make strategic decisions together on what is needed, and when it is needed.
The Agile Leadership Team needs to facilitate this and invite the right people to make well-informed decisions. When the executives are invited to see what is going on with updates from the teams on both impediments, speed of flow, quality, how the teams are doing – and how the customer experience is, how the delivery of value is going and how the investments are going, they can support new strategic decisions if needed.
This is the fifth post in the November Agile Leadership and Management Series.
So, now the time has come to look into a number of setups and activities that you can use to help get your Agile Leadership Team up and running and, continuously use for effectiveness and smoothness in their daily work.
With the Agile Leadership Team Bingo, you can gamify your work with your leadership- and management improvements for yourself and your leadership team. Challenge each other to see how many “BINGO” you can get in a day, week, or month?
Print it out, or use it digitally and bring it to your next leadership team meeting together with scissors and glue and we can guarantee that it will be one of the most fun and engaging leadership team meetings ever 🙂
This is an interview between Mia Kolmodin and Mattias Skarin on the basics of Agile Procurement and Agile Contracting.
Topics discussed
– When should you use Agile procurement? – What are the different steps in an Agile procurement? – How do you Agilize the process? – Are there any successful examples? – What are the most common pitfalls when getting started? – How do you get started?
The founders of agilakontrakt.se
Mia and Mattias are the founders of agilakontrakt.se and on this website they have for about 5 years collected good examples and created tutorials and guides in order to support the agilization of the procurement process in Sweden.
They have also set up several conferences in the Nordics on this topic and hosted a network that meets 4 times a year and shares experiences to grow new capabilities within the public and private market in Agile procurement. Anyone is free to join this network, you find it on the website.
We feel honored to have been invited to the Hacking HR chapter in Sofia/Bulgaria 🧡 In this webinar Mia Kolmodin and Thomas Eklöf walk you through the new poster on Agile Recruiting to manage in VUCA.
Free download of the Agile Recruiting in a Nutshell poster
Inspelningen är från DIs HR-dag den 30 september 2020 på Grand Hotel i Stockholm och online.
Här delar Mia Kolmodin på 15 minuter med sig hur Agila metoder kan användas av HR för stötta organisationer att transformera sitt eget arbetssätt, samt stötta organisationen i en Agil transformation för att att leverera rätt värde vid rätt tidpunkt. Mia rör också ämnen som Agilt Ledarskap, Agila Team och Agila tankesätt och ger dig 5 nycklar till en lyckad Agil Evolution.
Ämnet för årets DI HR-konferens är människor och kultur med mycket Agilt fokus.
För att hantera den oväntade situationen har många företag nu snabbt tvingats att digitalisera många av sina arbetssätt, och kanske även att till viss del agilisera sig.
Vi ser ännu tydligare än tidigare hur viktigt det är att inte hålla fast vid långa detaljerade planer, utan att i stället snabbt ställa om och möjliggöra för medarbetare och korsfunktionella team att fatta snabba beslut baserat på nya insikter för att lösa komplexa problem på bästa möjliga sätt.
HR spelar en mycket viktig roll för att möjliggöra en Agil transformation med snabbare leveranser, mer fokus på löpande innovation, teamarbete och strategisk flexibilitet. Med en mer snabbrörlig teambaserad organisation gäller det för HR att bland annat sluta arbeta med långsamma årliga cykler, som HR-hjulet, och i stället leverera förbättringar oftare, att prototypa och bygga in ett lärande i arbetssätten för att förbättra medarbetarupplevelsen och minska ledtider, att hitta nya samarbetsformer och arbeta korsfunktionellt att ställa om från ett individbaserat synsätt till fokus på teamet.
Nycklarna till en lyckad agil transformation, 20 minföreläsning online
Mia går med hjälp av inslag från praktiska case igenom de största strukturella förändringarna som ledning och HR behöver göra för att skapa förutsättningar för en teambaserad och snabbrörlig organisation och möjliggöra en lyckad Agil transformation.
DI HR’s heldagskonferens 2020 direktsänds från Grand Hotel i Stockholm.
På grund av situationen med Corona så livesänds konferensen och Mias föreläsning digitalt. Som besökare kommer du också att ha möjlighet att möta oss på Dandy People digitalt, ställa frågor till Mia och våra andra Agila experter, samt ta del av vårt coaching och utbildningsmaterial kring Agil HR, ledarskap, Business Agility och Agil transformation.
We are so happy to be able to share the Agile Leadership in a Nutshell with you for free also in Italian! Thank you so much Alessandro Amelotti for your awesome work with the translation 🙂
The posters is published under Creative Commons License, so please use it and share it as you like. If you are interested in doing a translation to any other languages please let me know and I will help you with the file and publish it here in the blog as well.
You are free to:
Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. This license is acceptable for Free Cultural Works. The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.
Under the following terms:
Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
We are so happy to be able to share the Agile Coaching Poster with you for free also in French! Thank you so much Anis Berejeb for your awesome work with the translation 🙂
We are so happy to be able to share the Continuous Learning and Growth in a Nutshell with you for free also in Spanish! Thank you so much Agilitychanges for your awesome work with the translation 🙂
We are so happy to be able to share the Agile Recruiting in a Nutshell to handle VUCA with you for free also in Spanish! Thank you so much Agilitychanges for your awesome work with the translation 🙂
We are so happy to be able to share the Agile Coaching in a Nutshell Poster with you for free also in Spanish! Thank you so much Daniela Palacios Rozas for your awesome work with the translation 🙂
We are so happy to be able to share the Transformational Agile Leadership in a Nutshell Poster with you for free also in Spanish! Thank you so much Pablo Lichinsky for your awesome work with the translation 🙂
We are so happy to be able to share the Monotasking In a Nutshell with you for free also in Spanish! Thank you so much Daniela Palacios Rozas for your awesome work with the translation 🙂
We are so happy to be able to share the Agile User Experience in a Nutshell Poster with you for free also in Spanish! Thank you so much Daniela Palacios Rozas for your awesome work with the translation 🙂
Vad är VUCA egentligen och vad betyder Agilt för rekrytering? Det och mycket mer diskuterar vi i det senaste avsnittet av Agila HR-podden med Frida Mangen. Jag med som en av gästerna tillsammans med de andra bakom vår senaste poster Agile Recruiting in a Nutshell.
Vi hade mycket spännande diskussioner tillsammans under själva framtagandet av postern, och så även här i studion – och vi är inte alltid helt överens 🙂 Jag delar med mig av lite av mina tankar kring hur man kan arbeta med rekrytering på ett Agilt sätt och hur man kan rekrytera för en Agil organisation.
The recruiting and onboarding process is something that often has to be adapted when organizations “go Agile”. We were curious about what can be done to adapt the process for the people working with recruiting, what it would mean for the candidate, and how and what to look for when hiring for Agility. So we got together as a cross-functional team to look at this with our different perspectives, Frida Mangen, known from the popular pod Agila HR-podden, Thomas Eklöf, and Nils Hallén, both experts on recruiting and authors of books like “Innovative Recruiting (in Swedish), Björn Sandberg Agile HR and transformation expert at Dandy, and myself, to see if we could create a poster as a first step. The work of creating the poster started in October 2019 and was paused a bit during COVID19. Now we are so happy to be able to share it with you after 8 months!
You can think of these principles as a lighthouse. If you are in sight of the light you are on the right path, but if you lose sight of it then you are probably off course.
Learning Dare to experiment! Test new ideas, gather data, learn, and improve! Beware that you still need to treat your candidates equally to sustain a reliable process.
Psychological Safety Human relations before processes and tools. Consider how you can create an environment where the candidate experiences psychological safety. This will help you to assess how the candidate behaves in a normal setting, otherwise, you risk just assess their behavior under stress.
Potential Potential eat experience for breakfast! Potential is critical for your future success. Rather than looking for readiness, i.e. previous experience, look for the right traits, motivators, capabilities, and behaviors.
Creating Value Adopt a dynamic mindset for recruiting. Evolve the way you work with recruitment by continuously improving yourself and your processes.
We all love how Modern Agile supports everyone thinking and acting in ways that support Agility, that is why we created a version of the Modern Agile by Joshua Kerievsky specifically for Agile recruiting.
We are so happy to be able to share the Agile Transformational Leadership in a Nutshell with you for free also in Italian! Thank you so much Alessandro Amelotti for your awesome work with the translation 🙂
We are so happy to be able to share the Agile Team in a Nutshell poster with you for free also in Italian! Thank you so much Alessandro Amelotti for your awesome work with the translation 🙂
We are so happy to be able to share the Agile in a Nutshell Poster with you for free also in traditional Chinese! Thank you so much, Paulino Kok and his team at agilizing.com for your awesome work with the translation 🙂
We are so happy to be able to share the Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell Poster with you for free also in simplified Chinese! Thank you so much, Paulino Kok and his team at agilizing.com for your awesome work with the translation 🙂
In this webinar we share our own story of what Agile has meant for u as individuals and our career. We talk about why Agility is needed today, and what a Learning Organization is and how it can support Business Agility. We also share some tips and tools you can use in your work as well as a glimpse of what it means to be an Agile Team and how you can become an Agile Transformational Leader. You will also gain an understanding of the content of the Online Agile Trainings from Dandy People.
A new live session of this webinar will come, but until then you can enjoy the recorded version here.
You will also gain an understanding of the content of the Online Agile Trainings from Dandy People.
In this webinar, Mia will share ideas and examples that enable Agile change and Agile ways of working, making any organization high performing by removing hindering structures and empowering the employees to deliver customer- and employee value.
In the world of today speed and flexibility is even more important than ever before. Unfortunately, this is the opposite of what our organizations have been constructed for.
In this presentation, Mia will share ideas and examples that enable Agile change and Agile ways of working, making any organization high performing by removing hindering structures and empowering the employees to deliver customer- and employee value.
In the world of today speed and flexibility is even more important than ever before. Unfortunately, this is the opposite of what our organizations have been constructed for.
Many organizations are in need of leveraging Agile across the organization to improve collaboration, shorten lead times and improve quality. One great way to do that is to use Agile online trainingsand facilitate the learning journey in different ways and embedding learning in your every-day work.
Since we will only get the impact of doing trainings when people actually use their learnings, starting to act and think differently all online trainings should focusing on driving curiosity, shared learnings and action.
To support organizations in tactics on how to engage and activate people through online trainings we created this poster that shows some ideas on how you can enable continuous learning and growth.
We are so happy to be able to share the Customer Journey Product Organization Poster with you for free also in Spanish! Thank you so much Daniela Palacios Rozas for your awesome work with the translation 🙂
We are so happy to be able to share the Agile in a Nutshell Poster with you for free also in traditional Chinese! Thank you so much, Paulino Kok and his team at agilizing.com for your awesome work with the translation 🙂
We are so happy to be able to share the Transformational Leadership in a Nutshell Poster with you for free also in French! Thank you so much Anis Berejeb for your awesome work with the translation 🙂
Webinar med Joaquim Linder från MittMedia/Bonnier News och Mia Kolmodin som facilititator.
Själva webinaret startar 09:00
BAKGRUND & INNEHÅLL I många organisationer är det svårt och stökigt att jobba med KPIer på ett effektivt sätt. Känner du igen dig i att olika delar av organisationen har olika KPIer (Key Performance Indicators), som ofta mäter det som ”ser bra ut” i stället för vad som egentligen är viktigt, som kanske drar åt olika håll, och ingen agerar på vad de visar?
Om man har ambitionen att skapa en Agil organisation så kan det här vara en viktig systemförändring som behöver ske för att låsa upp organisationen ur dödläget som ofta finns och möjliggöra samarbete och iterativt arbete tvärs över hela organisationen. Välkommen på en djupdykning in i mätbarhetens härliga värld. Lär dig hur rätt KPIer kan hjälpa er att nå visionen genom att möjliggöra effektiva leveranser på strategin.
JOAKIM LINDER Joaquim Linder är ansvarig på MittMedia för att tydliggöra strategier och göra dem tydliga och möjliga att agera på för de Agila teamen. Hans passion för att leverera kund- och affärsnytta har lett honom till att lära sig allt om hypotesdriven utveckling, KPIer och experimenterande i stället för att leverera lätta men ineffektiva lösningar. I den här sessionen kommer Joaquim att dela med sig av lärdomar, tankesätt och metoder som du själv kan använda för att aligna organisationen, se sanningen och leverera det som skapar värde tillsammans.
To handle the speed of change, complexity, and ambiguity in this challenging situation with the COVID-19 outbreak many of us are in now, we believe an Agile mindset can help us find new innovative solutions together.
Our mission at Dandy People is to support individuals, teams, organizations and societies to overcome challenges and become better together every day. This is why we decided to pre-launch our Agile Online Trainings, before we have all trainings on the platform. So, during this time we offer a 30% rebateto anyone of you who are interested in learning how to enable Agility, plan for the unknown and work and deliver in an Agile way.
Please use the code: PRELAUNCH (valid until March 31st) to get the 30% rebate.
The Agile Online Trainings you can access now are:
Agile in a Nutshell – Live
Agile Team in a Nutshell – Live
Agile Leadership in a Nutshell – Coming soon
These trainings contain videos, infographics, games, interviews, business cases, canvases, workshops, articles and lots of material free to download. Everything to support you in your personal learning journey to leverage Agility. Understanding what it is when it is needed and get you started to work as an Agile team – or improve your existing team, to deliver awesome results together.
We are also moving our live events to an online webinar format, and continuing to building our online Dandy Community
Please use the code: PRELAUNCH (valid until March 31st) to get the 30% rebate.
We have been able to create these trainings with support from the Agile global community and we are so happy to be able to give back to you all in times like this. Thank you so much to everyone involved <3
For the first time in modern history, most of us have to learn how to work remotely and collaborate online to continue with business as usual and not close down the business just because we close down the office. This is a huge experiment and we should look at it as an opportunity to adapt and learn how to handle the unexpected.
Working remotely from home with kids dressed up for work 🙂
We need to explore how can we run our business just as before, or even better. How can we make people feel like we are sitting and working together with our peers and teammates and do what we usually do to get stuff done, focus, enjoy our workday, have fun and deliver together?
Don’t forget, to get started quickly, try something out and improve from that is way much better than making the perfect plan, and never get started. Just make it good enough for now, and safe enough to try.
Here are some tips on how to do just that based on learnings from the Dandy People-team.
Top 5 Digital Tools that get you started Working Remotely
When making big changes in your ways of working and context it is wise to shorten the feedback loops and focus on making smaller improvements more often. Support your teams in whatever they might need and give them access to tools and coaching in the beginning, but let it be up to them to decide HOW to do the work. If you prioritize feedback and improvements you minimize the risk of disturbing the pace and quality of work and you can more easily adjust to what is happening.
We are so happy to be able to share the Agile in a Nutshell Poster with you for free also in simplified Chinese! Thank you so much, Paulino Kok and his team at agilizing.com for your awesome work with the translation 🙂
We are so happy to be able to share the Customer Journey Organization in a Nutshell Poster with you for free also in French! Thank you so much Anis Berejeb for your awesome work with the translation 🙂
We are so happy to be able to share the Enabling Business Agility in a Nutshell Poster with you for free also in French! Thank you so much Anis Berejeb for your awesome work with the translation 🙂
Make sure to have the Product Owner and everyone in the team in the room when the team pulls in new work to the sprint. First, ask them to name what it is, and talk about what the outcome would be – what should change? What are the details, ask them to describe it.
Then you can ask the team in what domain of complexity the works are, obvious, complicated or complex, and mark it on the card. Then depending on the domain ask them to agree on a story points, size or timebox and mark that. And then what capabilities would be needed to do the story.
When this is done ask the team to write down what needs to be done to deliver the story, these are your tasks – and the team can get started to collaborate and deliver innovation
The Cynefin Context Cards have helped many teams get started to work cross-functional doing both discovery and delivery in the teams. This is a version of the deck of cards with fewer cards, still keeping the same functionality to make it easy to print and use them. If you prefer to have the regular decks you can still buy them in our online store >
Stress blocks the pathways in the brain that need to be open for effective action, decision-making, and learning.
In a knowledge-intensive work life, we have to be careful with increasing the pressure, so that it doesn’t switch to stress. It is counterproductive because it reduces the intellectual capacity that we need as much as possible to cooperate, solve problems and innovate.
This means that the leadership must be a safe haven for development and achievement, not a source of stress.
This poster was created to cater to the need we see in many organizations today to create a shared understanding of what a well-functioning Agile team is and how you can build that team to get the value you expect from an Agile organization.
What is a team and how do you become high performing?
Is your team even a team? There are two things needed for a group of people to be able to become a team. Without them, the group can never be a team. The two things are:
A common goal
Needing each other
Stable Teams
Keeping teams stable overtime is needed to become and stay well-functioning and high-performing teams where smooth collaboration and innovation take place. Any change in the team setup may cause the team to go back to where they were as newly formed. Teams of 5-7 people who are kept together and get to high-performance are 100% faster.
Some months ago we had a meeting at Dandy trying to figure out and agree on who should be responsible for what, and how to divide our internal work in a better way. We needed to find a way to scale sustainably and figure out what capabilities we were looking for to expand our team in a good way also for the future.
We started to map the work we do and group it in different ways. But whatever we did we seemed to end up in traditional boxes, “this is marketing stuff, this is sales, this is finance, this is HR”… And then fighting over what the difference was between sales, marketing and finance… Everyone with their own ideas on what was right or wrong. That was of course not what we needed, another silos-based and ineffective organization :o)
Andreas Nordlund who is an Agile Coach at the payment provider iZettle came by the Dandy office to buy the Cynefin Context Cards to his team. I was curious and asked if he would like to share how he was planning on using the cards.
This picture is from another company using the cards.
Mia: How come you want to try the Cynefin Context Cards? Andreas: We are a group of Agile Coaches at iZettle who meet and share learnings and tips. Some of the other coaches have been using the cards and said they were good. I just got back from a training with Dave Snowden in Berlin in how to use the Cynefin Sense-Making Framework and I felt I wanted to try the cards.
Mia: What purpose do you see that the cards will serve? Andreas: We often talk about the work we do as if we are in the complicated domain, but often realize that we are in the complex domain. I want to help my team to put words on that, to facilitate that discussion in a structured way. Support the team to more easily come to the conclusion experiments are needed when they are in the complex domain.
In the IT department of the telecom company 3 of around 200 people, we worked with improvements on team-level and had a forum for improving the whole, but the overall improvements had come to an end after we met our previous change goal. Since we believe in experimentation, we decided to try Objectives and Key Results, OKRs, as a model to set the objectives.
Johan Hjort presenting the new OKRs for the Journey to Awesome for the people involved in creating them.
How do you create a change journey that matters? That involves the people in the organization in the why, what and how? That goes beyond the teams for long term agility and continuous improvement? This was something we needed to figure out, and we found a pretty cool way to do it that served us well, perhaps it can inspire you too to try something different.
The use of OKRs started in the ’70s in Intel, in 1999 Google was introduced to OKRs by John Doerr, and it’s still a key in how they run the business.
Before starting the work with the OKRs, we had created a common vision of how it would feel to work with digital services and products at 3 in about 5 years, a description embracing change and innovation, awesome collaboration on all levels, and IT stack that enables business value with short time to market and most important, high customer focus.
Target Group:Executives, Managers, Employees, Associates in all functions across the organization, everyone who belongs to a team, and you who also support teams, in an Agile organization.
