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Agile Project Leadership - Notes

Linkedin Course

What you should know about Agile Leadership

  • Is leadership an art or a science?
  • Leadership is a set of processes of steps that I could learn, like riding a bicycle or ice skating. Cycling an skating has artistic element too.
  • Leadership is the same. It has scientific steps and practices, but it's also an art that must be honed with focus and practice. This course will focus on both the science and art of leadership.
  • Pre-requisites - firm understanding of Agile practices, the Agile Manifesto, the Agile values.

Leadership Defined

How tradition leadership functions

  • command & control
  • authoritarian
  • top down

examples - millitary organizations, police, etc

How agile leadership differs from traditional

  • Leading - The ability to influence or guide others
  • Leadership is a mindset.
  • the Agile leader believes Agile values and practices; create environments and teams that can be harnessed for the greatest overall benefit.

Key Functions of Agile

  1. Allow failure to happen.

    • What went wrong
    • Why it went wrong
    • How to avoid it

  2. Shared knowledge is empowerement.

  3. Suppport team decisions.

Essential leadership skills for today

  • Humility - easiest wat to do this is by actively demonstrating a insatiable desire to learn.
  • Focus on outcomes, not actions - In its simplest form, this is stratergy. In its broadest form this is trust.
  • Flexiblity - As leader, you're focused on the outcomes; but you may have preconcived idea of how teams should do it - ** You have to let that go **
  • System view - You are part of system, so you can optimise it for your team.
  • Coach - You'r not going to solve the problem for them. Instead you'll nudge them toward their own conclusion.

Agile Leadership Objectives

Self-transformation to an agile leader

  • Defining goals and taking small steps repeatedly to grow in a specific direction,

Follow, D A R L A D - Define goal - Write your goal & put it somewhere you can see it everyday A - Asses your position - Seek feedback from others. R - Reflect - Use your notes to guide you to your goal. about what helped me moving toward my goal & which one didn't work L - Learn - Learm from others before you. A - Acknowledge Success - Reinforce your wins with positivity.

Team transformation to agile

  • understanding where team is in thier currnet practice.

  • the key is to assess all your teams unsing same criteria and measurement scale.

  • Assess overall product health, ask these questions -

    • Is the PO available when team needs them ?
    • Is there a clear vision & roadmap ?
    • Is there daily collaboration between PO & team ?

  • Assess technical health, ask these questions -

    • How much technical debt ?
    • How is the team reducing technical debt ?
    • Are the tests automated ?
    • Is the team using continuous integrations ?

  • Measure Metrics and Outcomes

    • Are they completing design-build-test cycles each sprint ?
    • Are they frequently releasing working software ?
    • Art they meeting release goals ?

  • How many defects in production ?

    • How many defects in production ?
    • Are defects fixed and test updated in the spring ?

  • Examine teamwork & culture

    • Are the teams members self-organized ?
    • do they hold regular retrospectives ?
    • do they embody angile values ? ( commitment, courage, focus, openness, respect )

Organizations gile transformation

  • On average, it takes about 3 years to transform a large organization.
  • Your role enables you to clear impediments, define stratergy and nudge the environment in right direction. Assess org in 3 broad categories
    • Teams -
      • looking of patterns in the team ( example, 3 team members found simmilar bugs )
    • Products -
      • looking for patterns in products across the organization.
      • How well is each product roadmapped ?
      • Are theri repeatable discovery and design processes ?
      • Is there a published stratergy for the product ?
      • how it the quality of the product ?
    • Leadership -
      • Assess how the leadreship is docing the journey toward agile.
      • Corporate stratergy is clearly defined and understood
      • Value delivery is universally focused
      • Organizational design removers silos and creates collaboration
      • Agile values and principles are incorporated int the company cultrue.

Agile Leadership Techniques

Decision-making frameworks

Four Primary decision making frameworks-

  1. Authoritarian Decision Making Advantages: Fast, direct, few compromises Disadvantages: Low buy-in
  2. Consultative Decision Making Advantages: Increased buy-in, more information Disadvantages: Takes longer
  3. Consensus Decision Making Advantages: Everyone is involved, greater buy-in Disadvantages: Time to decision
  4. Majority Decision Making Advantages: Less waterd down decision, quicker Disadvantages: Creates winners & losers

Agile principles in leadership

Agile manifesto focus areas

  • Individuals & interactions

    • Switching from Solve to Explore, ask question like,
      • What are your options?
      • Who are you working with to resolve this?
      • What's the desired outcome?

  • Working software

    • Perfection is the enemy of good enough.

  • Customer collaboration

    • hold regular conversation to deepen relationships and build trust.

  • Responding to change

    • Felixiblity shows our teams that surpries aren't scary. Surprises are opportunities to discover new solutions.

Set a team vision for motiviation

  • Unspoken belief that team meetings and 1-1 will set vision with everyone, this is a mistake
  • The vision is meant to be aspirational and create a sense of what could be
  • what you're looking for is a thread according to which everyone wants to belive, belong and act

** Team Vision Statement ** A statement that relfects the purpose of the team and who they aspire to become. It should also be in alignment with corporate vision. Vision Statement should be - short, - succint, - bold, - start with a draft - polish in future meetings

Leadership Stabilizaiton

Establish team values

  • Team vision is an aspirational goal for the team's future, whereas team values will define your culture.
  • Foundation of Team Values Instills trust among team members and provides a framework from which decision can be made.

** Amazon's Vision ** - "Our vision is to be earth's most customer-centeric compandy; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online" ** Amazon's Values ** ( here are top 4, they have 7 )

  • First is customer obsession

  • Invent and simplify

  • Ownership

  • Insist on the highest standards

  • Add continuous reminders of the team values in conversations and in decision-making

  • Remember, Values create your team culture. Culure creates behaviours that deive your desired outcome. As an agile leader, you can leverage your team values to drive outstanding performance.

Apply organizations stratergy

  • Leader's job to connect the dots between Corporate stratergy and Daily activity
  • You're reminding them thay have purpose and purpose is essential for engagement. It reminds everyone that what they do has meaning and is important beyond the boundries of the team.

Define priorities to direct work

Establising priorities is a key to ensuring the most important items are worked first.

MoSCoW technique

M is Must - Describes features that must be in the product for the product to be a success S is Should - Represents high priority features that should be included C is Could - Describes features that could be desirable but are not essential w is Won't - Features the statkeholders agreee won't be in the current release

ICE technique

Developed by Sean Ellis I is impact - Features which bring impact to the customers. C is confidence - Have overall confidence in the feature. E is ease - Implement the featue with ease.

ICE Score = Impact x Confidence x Ease Scale for scoring is usually 1 to 10

Maintain team focus

Step 1: Establish what's most important Step 2: Focus on what's important

Few techniques,

  1. Say no
    • Say no to clarify what's imoprtant now
    • try saying "not right now"
    • no doesn't mean never
  2. Plan for disctractions
    • Understand your distractions
    • Plan for them in the future
    • Create a framework for distractions

Conclusion

Leadership journey

  • Seek new information
  • Set new goals
  • Expand expertise

steps you can take to Futher your jouney as leader,

  1. Create a leadership team.
  2. Find a coach or mentor.
  3. Perform 360 degree review performend - it's simply a survery of those who work for you, your peers and thos who work above you.

Not, go lead

  • Refer (center of Agile leadership)[https://centerfor agileleadership.com]
  • Harward Business Review
  • Books
    • Tribal Leadership, by Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright
    • Drive, by Daniel Pink
    • The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patric Lencioni