My Presentations

Advice for anyone who is interested in public speaking: maintain you speaking history the same way as a university professors maintain their bibliography. It is not just useful when you do conference submissions or think about your professional progression. It is interesting to look back and think about the evolution of your professional interests and your contribution to the community of knowledge. So it seems the time has come to create mine:

December 21, 2015: What does Being Agile Mean to You? - PMI NYC Panel

November 3, 2015: PMI NYC: Practical Guide to Scaling Agile (the deck on Slideshare)

October  14, 2015: InRhythm University Meetup: Scaling Scaled Agile

June 16, 2015: Big Apple Scrum Day 2015: Agile Coaching is Dead: Long Live Agile Practicing!

June 17, 2013: Agile NYC: Enterprise Cadence (with Ilio Krumins-Beens) (description)

May 14, 2013: Agile/Lean Practitioners Meetup: Scrum Master: A Role or Title?

April 17, 2012: NY SPIN: Agile Hammer

September 20, 2012: Agile Day NYC:  Rolling out Agile Practices to 15 Teams in Six Months (with Ilio Krumins-Beens)

August 2, 2012: Agile NYC podcast 

I will be glad to speak at your Agile events! My bio is on PMI NYC site and here.

InRhythm is Scaling Scaled Agile

No one needs to prove that Agile is a modern delivery framework. According to VersionOne’s State of Agile Survey for 2015, 94% of all organizations surveyed are practicing Agile. In addition, 45% of respondents worked in development organizations where the majority of their teams are Agile. Contrast this with the 2009 report: only 31% of the respondents worked in organizations with zero to two teams practicing agile. There are multiple successful Agile implementations with well documented case studies around them.

We cannot state the same about scaling Agile. There are several frameworks: Disciplined Agile Delivery by Scott Ambler, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) by Dean Leffingwell, and Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) by Craig Larman. Introduced by three different thought leaders, each framework generated communities of practice and a number of positive stories related to successful implementations. That being said, each of those frameworks requires deep analysis and experience in scaling Agile in order to be successful. Frameworks define the approach and the implementation paradigm, but in each case it is the methodology built on top of those frameworks and the company-specific execution that makes or breaks it.

At InRhythm, we have been providing enterprise level Agile support for almost 10 years, and we have our own defined methodology. When SAFe was introduced, we felt that our experience and approach resonated with the crispness and the combination of Agile and Lean practices defined by SAFe. Our current approach to supporting large organizations in scaling their Agile delivery is based on three steps:

1. The InRhythm signature Agile assessment, which provides an organization with an overview of their strengths and opportunities and practical recommendations. This assessment also serves as an input into a customized Scaled Agile boot camp.
2. The InRhythm Scaled Agile boot camp is provided separately for managers and for team members. For managers, there is a two-day SAFe Agilist (SA) class certified by the Scaled Agile Academy and a one-day workshop to discuss and define how it relates to their specific organization, map their processes, and roles to SAFe concepts.
3. The InRhythm Scaled Agile Coaching for Agile teams ensures that SAFe principles are well understood and that teams are developing consistent and repeatable practices, introducing proper metrics, and making their Agile implementation self-sustainable, so that all practices remain in place when our InRhythm coaches leave.

Now, a little bit about my recent personal experience in working with an InRhythm enterprise client on the West coast, a well-known and highly reputable company:

How did this collaboration happen?

InRhythm’s goal is to bring thought leadership to our clients and support change within their organizations. The clients who bring us in are the leaders within their organizations. We come in as change agents to support their commitment to continuous improvement. This is how this company, via a prior client referral, brought us in to support their commitment to scaling Agile.

Initially, a team of Agile coaches came on site to meet with their executives, team members, as well as product and delivery managers. The team attended their Agile ceremonies, reviewed artifacts, and mapped their delivery processes. Their receptivity to change, open thinking, and positive attitude still resonate with me. I felt proud to have had a chance to collaborate with such a strong leadership team. We were able to identify their areas of strengths, which they could build upon, as well as provide practical advice on areas of opportunity that, if addressed, will expedite delivery and support quality at the portfolio level. Based on our findings, we created a customized training curriculum to provide specific implementation details to the teams within a large portfolio.

Once this was shared and presented to the client, we were excited to head back on site and provide the training, which we certified with the Scaled Agile Academy. The training covered how a large software delivery structure should be organized, how to manage dependencies, how to identify priorities at release level, how to build program-level engineering practices, and several practical details of scaled Agile implementation. In addition, we discussed how each of those principles applied to their specific organization:

• How many Agile Release Trains they have in their Agile portfolio and what should they be
• How their current roles and responsibilities map to those at the program and portfolio levels within Scaled Agile framework
• How to build a sense of ownership on their teams
• How to map their organizational vision and mission to the strategy they would like to implement
• Other practical aspects of their Agile implementation
• 
  
• This was a great collaborative workshop facilitated by InRhythm with the delivery team owning the solutions

The feedback from the boot camp participants was that it was an eye opening conversation with indispensable practical value and a solid foundation for their scaled Agile implementation.

The next step for us is to coach their Agile implementation teams at the portfolio and program levels, co-create artifacts that reflect their unique objectives and organizational structure, and provide thought leadership in building repeatable processes that will stay with the organization after we leave. It is such a great responsibility, and so much fun, to help organizations build world-class practices and sustainable cultures of Agile delivery at scale!

Using Agile to Run Our Company

What can you use Agile and Lean for? Software delivery? Manufacturing? My answer: everything! Even running a company. This is how we do it at InRhythm.

Let’s first consider the value. For me, as an Agile Coach and practitioner for many years, there are three things that make any Agile team successful:

• Collaborative, cross-functional team
• Healthy backlog aligned with business objectives
• Established cadence, AKA rhythm 

As simple as it sounds, this is not easy to achieve: a team is going through multiple phases before it becomes high performing. A backlog is a product of multiple conflicting priorities and ambiguous features, and the cadence is frequently impacted by multiple emergencies and schedule changes. Yet, without all three components it is impossible to achieve an established velocity or high productivity.

As the COO of InRhythm, I see my role in leading and supporting the team in establishing our operational rhythm based on all three Agile components of success listed above, and this is how we do it:

1. Collaborative cross-functional team. Culture comes before everything else. It has been proven time and again that collaborative well balanced teams achieve success in every single area they choose, while a collection of brilliant misaligned individuals moving in opposite directions rarely is capable of accomplishing anything significant.

Everyone on the InRhythm operations team is supportive and ready to swarm on high priority items no matter if they fall within their immediate area of accountability. How do we achieve that?

Step 1: We create a cross-functional epic to achieve any strategic goals, whether it is a new on boarding process for our consultants, or a company Meetup for our engineers - open to any technologists who would like to join us.

Step 2: For each cross-functional epic, everyone creates stories and tasks related to their functional area of contribution – for example, for the Meetup, our talent development team, CTO, marketing – everyone collaborates to make these workshops successful and informative for engineers.

2. Now the second component of Agile success: a healthy backlog. We have weekly sprints so our backlog is never stale. We do ongoing grooming during the sprint and we use persistent chat to discuss any questions related to priorities and time lines. When we need input from the team, we create tasks for our team members. Just-in-time tasking helps us stay current. The challenge of just-in-time tasking is to ensure there is a handshake and an agreed upon time line between the team members, so that the scope does not increase during the sprint. Our Agile tool, Jira, is a helpful mechanism of organizing our backlog and reflecting planning results in a prioritized and structured form.

3. The third component is the well-established cadence, or our operational rhythm. In order to stay in rhythm, we needed to define whether release planning applies to an operations team and whether sprint cadence works for us better than kanban, which is traditionally suitable for operations. We discussed our cadence at the latest retrospective, and decided to leave the rhythm of quarterly strategic planning, monthly release planning, and weekly sprint review and planning sessions, in addition to the daily stand up. We are still finalizing the format for each of these ceremonies.
What is my role on this team? Probably you’ve guessed already. As a team member responsible for running smooth operations, I act as a Scrum Master. No more status meetings or progress updates which I was accustomed to in the corporate world before I came to InRhythm. Collaboration, alignment, open mindedness – these are all signs of a productive team. Our burndown chart and sprint commitment rate (the ratio of completed work to committed work within the sprint) are the best indicators of the predictability and quality of planning.

About lean: Continuous improvement is the heart of our Agile implementation. At every retrospective we come up with more ideas for how to optimize our processes, make them repeatable by creating checklists and templates, utilize modern tools such as online checklists or new Jira functionality – whatever it is, we are eager to try and learn. Once one of us comes up with an idea, the team discusses it and everyone is positive, open minded, and ready to try it out. If it works, we make it part of the process, if it does not, we pivot.

We do not wait for retrospectives to improve our processes. We try to come up with one improvement a day – whether it is installing chrome boxes in our conference rooms or turning one of the conference rooms into a cozy library full of technical and professional growth books. There are small ones, such as switching from a phone call to Google hangouts for our stand ups – but whatever they are, everyone feels ownership and support in introducing our “2-second improvements” every day.

There is a lot more I can tell you about how exciting Agile journey is for our team, but I do not want to give you impression that everything is perfect. We are on our journey to fine tune our rhythms and working towards commitment rate of 90%. Predictability of delivery is very important to us because our clients and consultants depend on how efficient and responsive we are on the operations side, so predictable and efficient operations are our utmost priority.

One Week Introduction to Agile Culture: A Case Study

Today is Friday, and my first week at a new job is almost over. When I googled “first week at work”, I got numerous posts entitled “how to survive your first week at a new job”. Wow! – I thought, my experience was completely opposite, and here is why.

I joined company that builds software products using Agile framework - I knew that from the beginning. What I came to know is that they take pride in bringing Agile culture in and leaving it with the client when they move on - they refer to this as "high impact". And it shows. On my first day when I came to work, I was not sure where I sit… until I saw multicolored balloons and a welcome card signed by my new colleagues. Each of them wrote words of encouragement and wished me a lot of success in a new job. I felt very welcome.

Actually, I felt welcome much earlier starting with the day of my job interview where everyone was super friendly and sincerely interested in my career aspirations and professional strengths. This does not mean that the interview questions were simple and straightforward; they were very insightful, but it was a conversation where I was able to share my thoughts and skills and learn about the company and the people. Once I got home from the interview, I already felt that I have become part of a great team. There was ongoing communication until the day I showed up in the office and in addition, I had a chance to join everyone for a meetup on Node.js, so it already felt like home.

Today is my fifth day at a new job, and I already feel like part of the InRhythm family. How was it possible in five short days? First, it does not feel like five days. Everything happens fast here. I am in Operations, and our role is to support the teams working on client sites. We need to move fast, make decisions, and respond to the needs of our teams and the clients. We need to be nimble and efficient. We care about the people, the products they develop, and the clients they support. The team is like a family. What happens in a good family if someone needs help and support? The same happens here. Everyone is a leader taking ownership. At the same time, if there is a need, we swarm and get things done fast. One of the company’s values is that we hire and work with only the best, and this is true. Everyone is remarkable individually, and yet we are much stronger as a team.

The other interesting feature is how open minded everyone is. We use Agile to run the business, and when I suggested to try some new ideas, everyone supported this. Coming from the corporate environment, I am used to resistance to change and I was ready to face it. But I did not need to! Everyone was supportive and willing to try, and super encouraging. One my colleagues told me how much she appreciated the small changes that we introduced this week, and she said that while they were small, she felt they were helpful. Other colleague sent me a message that his standup experience has improved to encourage me, and immediately made further helpful suggestions. Everyone was receptive and willing to share their excitement and feedback. Transparency is valued highly here.

I can add that there is ongoing communication in the company where anyone can ask questions, make suggestions, simply support each other, and celebrate successes. Persistent chat and multiple other channels are used to exchange opinions and align on any complex issue. And – most importantly – everyone has a great sense of humor, so there is a lot of fun and jokes.

I learned a lot during my first week here. Most important is the ability to always work on the highest priority item and to be strategic about ow I invest my time. When I joined, I got a notepad where I can list three highest priority items I plan to accomplish each day. If an item does not fit within the three designated cells, do not do it. The way I prioritize my work is by working on high impact items, and never getting distracted with anything else. Working hard on a non-important items is worse than doing no job at all. This is a great approach which I was excited to embrace. It resonated with me, since professional success for me was always about bringing value - to the organization, to its customers, to my colleagues.

I can go on and on, but I think it’s time to pause, because it’s hard to describe the atmosphere of innovation, openness, and the friendly positive attitude everyone in the office brings in. I want to wish everyone who is reading this post to have a chance to experience such a supportive, open minded, and value driven culture in your professional life. No more ”how to survive the first week”, it’s my “best first professional week ever”! This is the impact of a true Agile culture and open minded transparent office environment where the team is swarming to achieve a common goal. I truly believe you do not need to be a startup to build a culture that embraces Agile values.

Agile Coaching is dead. Long live Agile practicing!

An exciting experience presenting at Big Apple Scrum Day 2015 and a great discussion about the future of Agile coaching as a profession. Full deck is posted here.

The power of the First 90 Days

Moving from a consulting job to a permanent role in a new organization is never easy. From a consulting role with an airline industry client to an Agile delivery role with a major health insurance company - comparable size (160K+ employees), corporate culture, multimillion dollar projects, agile at significant scale and yet, everything was different and new for me there.

Multiple challenges, ultimate uncertainty, lack of buy in, significant resistance, lack of trust, strong waterfall mentality - everything that we are so well familiar with as change agents coming to an organization as agile coaches and leaving as part of the transformed and high performing work environment leaving high performing and self organizing teams behind. I did not come to my new job to leave though, the scope was unlimited and the amount of work would last long enough for a long professional life span and well beyond. I came to enlighten, transform, and execute.

I was excited. I had great conversations at multiple job interviews that resonated with me. Agile at significant scale, like minded agilists excited about building products that transform healthcare and delight customers. I did my research, asked a lot of questions, and felt that I was well prepared. I spent my two days before joining putting my 90-day plan together. It was a no brainer. Build relationships, create the team, hire as needed, put together a transformation roadmap, socialize, get buy in, come up with a training and coaching approach, position the team externally, empower them, get them the tools, identify continuous improvement opportunities, decide on metrics, start execution, compare the baseline with the first few sprints' data, and celebrate successes.

Pretty simple for a 90-day plan. I wanted to assess the environment and start whatever would take me to change the delivery culture and mindsets at scale. I was excited about my 90-day roadmap! It was following the SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, result-oriented, time-bound) format, so each milestone had specific acceptance criteria and the timelines. For example, I was committing to building relationships by introducing myself to 5 people per day within the first 10 days, 2 people for the following 20 days, and 1 person the remainder of the 90 days. There was a breakdown which areas of the organizations these relationships should come from because I wanted to cover software delivery, project management, product management, business side of things and other dedicated teams. All thought through in minor detail.

I started with a lot of enthusiasm of an Agile coach who came to an organization to stay, to transform it from waterfall to the collaborative culture of ongoing delivery. I was thinking hackathons, product workshops, innovation weeks, collaborative spaces, agile at scale, multi-day PI planning sessions, changing the way healthcare is administered and perceived. My 90-day plan was translated into color-coded stickies and attached to the wall in my office. I was all set and ready to sprint.

The following 90 days were a torture. My 90-day release planning for a new job was forgotten. It was an ongoing never ending set of challenges ranging from archaic engineering practices to the process challenges multiplied by the high distribution rate for team members, lack of trust with the business, and ton of inefficiencies. But the people were amazing and teams were willing, and the product team was a fountain of ideas and suggestions!

So I did my version of Agile maturity assessment, spent a lot of time with teams and stakeholders and while doing that, met like-minded people and created multiple task force teams to address prioritized action items for continuous improvement. We made it a rule that every day we want to accomplish something, even though it may feel small and insignificant. And each time a user story was completed, I moved a user story on our kanban board to the right column tagged as "Completed". I worked around the clock, worked directly with multiple teams, and somehow things started moving. The teams moved into a cadence, became higher-performing, were moving ahead fast, implemented ATDD, and were plowing ahead overall.

So one day I came to work, checked stickies on my 90-day board and was stunned to notice that all the stickies are gone from the left and the right column has them all as completed. All my tiredness was gone and I was more excited about my Agile delivery role than ever. The teams within my portfolio are not highly performing yet, but they are developing quality software at cadence, they are collaborative, innovative, empowered. Their technical maturity is growing. Team members work at sustainable pace. I looked at a calendar, and - surprise - it was exactly 90 days since I started my new employment. All of a sudden I realized that I've completed all my user stories - my 90-day sprint was not wasted. Just like Michael Watkins says in his book, "The First 90 Days", it is all about building momentum during a challenging transition.

So the momentum is built now. The transition roadmap is in place. This is where the power of the first 90 days is!