Stay Agile , Stay Relevant

Let’s get started the standard way and answer - What is Agile ? One of the literal meaning of being agile is the ability to move quick and easy , yes it’s that simple and important and it aptly fits into scheme of things when we related it with software development.

World is changing and changing fast, way out ? "Stay Agile Stay Relevant ".

Agile Manifesto created in 2001 defined four core values :

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools,
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan.

Putting it in different perspective , it’s about Collaboration , Empowered teams , Accountability , Transparency , Inspect and adapt , Prioritization . I strongly believe if we aim for and achieve these we can claim to be agile in true sense and yes organization success  will be sure shoot byproduct .

Now on the how part ,there are multiple methodologies inspired by agile values which can be your navigator - Scrum (Probably the most popular one ) , Kanban , Scrum ban ,Lean , XP ..etc . Some of us might be thinking , ok... all this is fine , but can agile really make sense to big multination organizations  having their  cross functional teams spread across continents ? valid question , but the good part is there exist answer and ways to fix that - SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework ), Oracle PLM(Product Lifecycle management )  for instance are couple of them among multiple others ,over the years  many organizations have successfully crafted and implemented their in-house scaled methodologies based on agile principles and learnings .

Let’s remember one of the key principle of agile , i.e inspect and adapt , so go and figure out what suits best for your team or organization .

To summarize : Inspect and Adapt - GO AGILE

Collaboration vs Specification

Just in case you are wondering why should they really compete out there , No that’s not the idea , off course they do complement each other in some sense .
Most of us use and practice them so often that I just thought of putting across my thoughts around them .What I intend to highlight is that collaboration should be given more importance over specification more often than not ,gaps if any due to this prioritization will be effectively addressed implicitly.

 Sometimes few of us are so passionate about specifications that’s we don’t restrict specification limits well and keep elaborating them , it mostly does harm than benefiting anyone. Elaborating specification beyond desired level kills time ,decreases flexibility and reduces our  empirical capacity .On other hand linear progress with collaboration leads to exponential benefit towards motivation and engagement  leading to organizational value creation .

 Collaboration is multidimensional , we shouldn’t restricted it to our peers or immediate team ,let’s take it further to other teams within organization , management and off course customers . Many a times we usually hesitate to collaborate with customers(internal and external ) but with a good mix of collaboration and negotiation (forward looking ) we can get expected outcomes addressing mutual needs and creating win-win situations. Collaboration between stakeholders and development teams helps bridging gaps between expectations and delivery. Collaboration leads to commitment , it creates environment for collective ownership of ideas ,objectives and results .

Courage and respect are important step towards collaboration and i see it hard we reaching out there without exercising them . Making effective use of communication via open dialogue and looking at the bigger picture will smoothen our collaborative journey .

“ Collaboration pays better than individual excellence....Let's exercise it ” 

Agile SW Development - Spotify way

For people who haven't heard about Spotify, Spotify is popular music streaming company based out of Stockholm Sweden. Spotify was founded in year 2006 and its closest competitor is Apple Music. Spotify had 180 million active users as on June 2018 and it provides 40+ million songs to its users and their services are available across 65 countries/markets.
Moving ahead, the reason for sharing their Agile journey/story is for the fact that it indeed reflects value creation using Agile principles in positive sense and have worked well so for a continuously scaling organization. Spotify can be seen as a successful Scaled Agile Framework which is and can be possibly applied organization wide and its value is not just limited to small groups or business unit. Spotify is basically a people-driven, autonomous framework for scaled Agile.For the people who are new to Scaled Agile topic, its good to list down some of popular Scaled Agile frameworks , SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework ) , DaD(Disciplined Agile Delivery ), LeSS (Large Scale Scrum ) are widely accepted and deployed Scaled Agile frameworks.
Let’s take a step further and understand the details of how stuff works at Spotify. Squads ,Tribes, Chapters, and Guilds are the key drivers to run the Scaled Agile Machinery at Spotify.

Squad is the core foundation of the Agile framework at Spotify and is very similar to a Scrum team. The Squad like Scrum or Agile teams is self-organizing,it defines and decides the preferred execution model from Scrum to Kanban to any hybrid model. The Squad is single-product, single-project focused. A Squad can be related to a mini start-up and it essentially means it can operate reasonably autonomously. As a team it has all the knowledge and tools to design, build, test and put into production a product.
Since its self-organizing it therefore does not have a formally appointed Squad Leader or a Scrum Master but to prioritize the work to be done, each Squad has a Product Owner. In line with Scrum, the Product Owner maintains the Team Backlog. Agile coach works with team to accelerate agile transformation.This essentially means enough emphasis is given to the Agile coach role and value it brings.
Tribe is group of Squads that is working in a common area. The Tribe is co-located with the Squad and is typically limited to ~100 people.
The Chapters are part of a Squad and are a group of team members working together. The Chapter Leader, can be related with the Engineering manager and is responsible for personnel aspects such as hiring, compensation, career development, and guidance. In addition to these tasks, the Chapter Leader also acts as a specialist in a Squad.
Guild is a group of people with shared interests. Guilds are typically not tied to the boundaries of a Tribe, but rather walk right through the organization. Every Guild has its Coordinator who facilitates Guild meetings and to motivates the participants. The Guild Coordinator has, in contrast to the Chapter Leader, no hierarchical powers.
On the face of it the concept of Squad, Chapter and Tribes looks like a typical matrix organization but the principle differentiator are the driving values and the inherent autonomy in the Spotify model.
Moving on, one might think this all is fine but what but what makes things work ??? for that it’s important to look into some of the core values practiced @Spotify:

• Agile mindset over Scrum or a specific methodology
• Agile Coach over Scrum Master
• Cross-Pollination across organization over Standardization prescribed to teams
• Fast Failure Recovery over Failure avoidance
• Impact over Velocity
• Trust over Control
• Innovation over Predictability ( 100% Predictability means 0% Innovation)
• Value creation over Plan fulfillment

As closing remarks, just to be fair and pragmatic, there are no magical ways which can be applied as standard prescription for one and all. The model and organization under discussion will for sure have its own set of challenges and they might still be continually evolving and things might shape up differently when they scale further and dynamics change dramatically .Every organization have its own culture build slowly and firmly out of exhaustive factors like organization evolution, size, locations, product or business complexity to name a few, choose or tailor what works best for your team/organization .
Idea here was to share an Agile success story, in case it ignites you to deep dive and seek possible synergies or learning, you can find enough content available over web to explore further on the topic or please write down and we can collaborate.