Bringing Agile To Tauranga
13/10/2017
I think sometimes Tauranga gets a bad rap as a place for the ‘newly wed or the nearly dead’. Those of us that are lucky enough to live here know what a special place this is where collaboration and connections are part of our DNA whereas those outside this region don’t necessarily see this as the most innovative place to be. BUT when you put out the call to host an event about all things Agile Project Delivery and 130 people turn up, it’s a clear indication that things in this city are a-changing!
A few weeks back a crowd of people gathered to hear from leading Agile practitioners who outlined their experience around business agility, the lessons learned from sport and how this applied in a business sense, practical agile implementation and technical health. There were a number of key insights but as a takeaway, here were the highlights from my perspective:
Agile is more than just a software development methodology. There were a number of examples throughout the day of organisations who start implementing agile as a way to improve project outcomes and quickly realise that just ‘doing’ agile doesn’t mean better results. To truly enable change the focus must become ‘being’ agile. This is much more about mindset than methodology.
There are some examples where agile by stealth works whereby specific project teams decide to take a more agile project delivery approach without making a big song and dance about this. The real transition from doing to being agile must have executive buy in. This is important in order to relook at value as defined by clients and the organisation which impacts everything from reporting to project approaches to team structures. To get buy-in, one approach is to involve the exec team in a small project – it is much easier to feel the difference as opposed to being told about the changes via Powerpoint.
There were some great tools and techniques mentioned throughout the day including the Spotify Squad health check – a free resource that Spotify has published which outlines how they visualise what is working and areas to improve in their agile teams. Check it out here: https://labs.spotify.com/2014/09/16/squad-health-check-model/
All in all – great to see a bunch of people, who were passionate about creating change within their organisation, come together for the day to talk about ways to do that better, faster, bigger. If you did attend we’d love to know what you thought so we can look to make this an annual event.
If you are interested in getting involved in the Agile Tauranga Meetup group – head over here to sign up: https://www.meetup.com/Agile-Tauranga/ - some of the presentation slides will be uploaded here in the next week.
Finally – my favourite quote of the day goes to my new favourite Agile Guru – Sandy Mamoli who is an Agile Consultant with Nomad8 “Fail often, fail early but give a s*#t”
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Written by Clare Swallow