Agile done right

Agile is a big buzzword nowadays; however, it’s not as simple as people may think. To get a better understanding of some of the complexities behind agile, I met with Ajay Kabra, senior leader, evangelist, and main contributor to the Agile space for Xebia.

Xebia is a Global Technology Strategy and Consulting firm with Full Stack Software Engineering, Product Development, and Digital consulting capability to enable the digital transformation of enterprises using the latest technology and methodologies. Over the years, Xebia has organically built domain knowledge across industries and used a platform engineering mindset to help fortune companies digitize.

Ajay:
Agile has been in the market for nearly two and a half decades, and interestingly, people have adopted agile, but they have not adopted it in the true spirit of the game. What I mean by the true spirit of the game is that everyone wants to do agile, but agile promises or recommends, demands, suggests that you give control to people, decentralize your decision making. And that is one of the challenges in the game where the senior leadership is afraid of giving control to the team. And one of the challenges that I’ve seen is that management wants everyone to be agile, but the management themselves don’t want to be agile. So, what happens is you will typically notice that they would love for me to go and train, educate, and coach all the teams, but they themselves will not take any coaching. So, what happens is that you have a problem between management and the teams. The team is now agile-oriented, they speak the language, but you would typically notice that on the other side of the fence, which is the management, they are still the old school of thought. And that is where the challenge comes.

As we always say, Agile is, more than anything, a mindset shift. So, unless the cultural shift happens in the mind unless the democracy has been given, unless the decision-making power — empowerment has been given to the team, we are more involved in doing a lot of micromanagement. And because of the micromanagement concepts and the way we address people, agile has not given the amount of success, the number of benefits that it should have provided, that it promised to the market.

To be honest, there are many organizations that have achieved a decent amount of success, a decent number of results; financial, ROI, behavior norms, employee retention, employee happiness, doing better jobs, developing quality products, by using agile. However, the majority of the world has not realized the benefits due to the challenges I highlighted earlier.

Avrohom:
So, Ajay, what IS the right mindset business leaders need to have in order to succeed with agile? When we spoke offline earlier, you mentioned discipline. Can you share some examples of success?

Ajay:
One of the mindsets that business leaders should adopt is to be attached to the outcome rather than how the work is done and when it’s going to be done. As a manager, I need to know from my team when they are going to deliver and what they are going to deliver. Beyond this, my role as a leader should end, and my role as a leader would only come in if my team has an impediment or a showstopper. Only then should I be the person to do that particular job.

But what’s really happening in the market is that we are destroying the discipline by micromanagement, by interfering in the team decisions, and that is causing many challenges. So, when we talk about the discipline, I really expect management to understand what agile can do and what agile can not do, and also understand that with agile, how their role will change. How they will have to modify themselves to fit into the new culture of agile and the new ways of working with agile; we need to start understanding and appreciating those elements.

Avrohom:
I really love what you said about the right mindset our leaders need to have and not micromanage so much. We’ve all had that experience, and a family member of mine recently had a situation at her job where her manager micromanaged her to the point where when she was writing code, her manager told her, “Don’t use this statement” and “Add this statement.” Of course, these suggestions completely broke the code, and rather than speeding up the process, she wasted several days troubleshooting her manager’s unhelpful suggestions.

Ajay:
And that’s exactly the point, that as leaders, we should know what the boundaries of operation should be. Where I need to interfere, and I should only interfere if the team wants me to interfere. Otherwise, give the democracy to the team, give the empowerment to the team, give them all the tools, all the funding, all the budget, all the infrastructure, give them your moral support, and back them up for failures. Everything is not always going to go perfectly. Things are going to go wrong. There will be crises. Allow the team to do things. We need to provide a failsafe environment. That’s what I call discipline, and that’s what I call the mindset.

One of the challenges that I’ve seen in my 33-year industry career is that whenever I give an estimate to someone, the management’s reaction is always, “Oh, that’s too much. Can you do it in less time?” If I say it will take ten days, they ask me if I can do it in 5 days. I would rather ask my team, if they estimated ten days, to help me justify how they arrived at ten days. Perhaps, after hearing them out, I might tell them that ten days are too aggressive, and perhaps they need 20 days! That kind of mindset is missing in the market. So, what ends up happening is that many organizations build a buffer into their estimates so that when management cuts their timeline in half, they can still deliver their commitments on schedule. However, this destroys the entire ecosystem and it destroys the entire thought process.

Avrohom:
One of the ways Xebia sets itself apart as an industry leader in software development is with its customer training. What is the right way to train clients in new technology?

Ajay:
Before we engage a customer, we love to make a diagnosis with them. It’s as simple as going to a doctor and getting a prescription for some tests. The doctor will first examine the test results, and only after a careful evaluation will he prescribe medication. With that similar approach, we like to make a diagnosis with the customer. Understand their pain points, goals, objectives, and vision. Now, once we understand that particular ecosystem, then it becomes simpler for us to suggest them a roadmap.

Now, there is one very interesting concept that we do. We always do something called co-create. What it means is, if I have a customer, I will work with the customer management and then create a plan together, rather than a plan and an approach given by us and say, “Ok, do it. This is what I tell you because I’m the consultant.” I would rather engage the customer because they know their organization better than I do. So, we try to do a co-create, and based on that co-create, we then do the training.

Now, sometimes what I also do with a lot of my customers is engineer a crisis! You know, there is no crisis, but I create a situation where a crisis happens, and then I tell them how to solve that problem. Sometimes, you really have to learn by doing it and by demonstrating how it can be done. There is a huge difference between standing in a workshop and giving knowledge that will be the idealistic knowledge of the world. But then, I have also realized that –

Avrohom:
Real life!

Ajay:
Real life is very, very different. So, that is a place where I actually engineer a crisis to now start demonstrating to the team, to the management, to the middle layer of the organization how this problem has to be solved and how you should react.

Avrohom:
Besides serving clients, Xebia is also very active in the agile community. For example, Xebia organizes the Agile NCR event, which is held annually in the APAC region. Can you share with us a little bit about Agile NCR, as well as some of the upcoming exciting endeavors you will be launching here in North America in the near future?

Ajay:
Sure. Why do we do this community service? Xebia has four core values, and the second core value is, sharing knowledge. And we honestly love to live that particular value. These values are lived by different mechanisms in the game. One of the mechanisms that we have is we do a lot of community conferences. These conferences are there to spread the message and to get all the world gurus under one umbrella so that the industry learns from their experiences, their success stories, or failure stories.

We have been successfully running Agile NCR, which is the premier conference in India and APAC, for the last thirteen years. This year will be the thirteenth year, and we are hosting it on the 11th and 12th of November in India. Apart from that, we do a lot of other things for the community. For the Americas, this year, in April, we launched a new brand of the conference, which is called Agile Americas. It was a one-day conference held on a live virtual board. At our next conference of Agile Americas, we are planning to have two Agile Americas. The Agile Americas East Coast, and the Agile Americas West Coast. One would be done in April, and the other would be done in October. And our idea is again the same, spread knowledge, get the right people in the forum, help the industry learn through experiences, lessons learned, networking, and bring the right set of minds into the game so that as a community, we can grow.

Avrohom:
Ajay, how do people connect with you to learn more about Xebia?

Ajay:

You can connect with Xebia at our website: https://xebia.com, and with me, personally, on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajaykabra/.

Avrohom:
Do you have any parting words of wisdom to share with the audience?

Ajay:
The scrum guide consists of 14 pages. If you take away the cover page and table of contents, it’s 12 pages of actionable guidelines. Those 12 pages need to be interpreted in the right way for us to make business sense. Twelve pages are not too big. And what it requires is for you to do the implementation in the true spirit of the game and watch it for three months. You will then see visible signs of improvement.

If you do it the right way, you will get the right results. If you are not getting the right results, then I recommend we should be doing some retrospectives to learn what went wrong and then trying to reimplement, rather than saying that agile doesn’t work in our organization.

Every organization is unique, and every project is different. We have to start understanding the context of the situation and then implement the right kind of approach. It has to be time-tested, and for that, we need a lot of patience to allow things to happen. Agile requires that kind of patience to grow, mature, and deliver results.

WATCH this interview on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Wbmc5w8fhUA
Listen to the interview on Soundcloud: https://on.soundcloud.com/vhYt7


About the Author

Avrohom Gottheil is the founder of #AskTheCEO Media, where he helps global brands get heard over the noise on social media by presenting their corporate message using language people understand.

Avrohom presents his clients as Thought Leaders, which challenges his audience to reimagine their own mission and vision, delivering actionable insights, and leaving them passionate, motivated, and with the necessary tools to take immediate action.

Avrohom comes from a 20+ year career in IT and Telecom, where he helped businesses around the world install and maintain their communication systems and contact centers. He is a Top-ranked global expert in IoT, AI, Cloud, and Cybersecurity, followed worldwide on Twitter, and a frequent speaker on leveraging technology to accelerate revenue growth.

Listen to him share the latest technology trends, tools, and best practices for IoT, AI, Cloud, Cybersecurity, and more, on the #AskTheCEO podcast — voted as the #1 Channel Friendly Podcast 2019 by Forrester.

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