Ep 10 (Aired 8/29/18) Special Edition: Inside the Apollo 13 studio - The Agile Roundtable Part 1

[Music] this episode of agile after dark we get to part one of a special episode of inside Apollo 13 Studio the agile Round Table where we get to ask our esteemed guests some very specific questions based on their experience involv around leadership full agile and the agile industrial complex listen in it's a good one good evening welcome to Agile after dark the podcast that addresses agile topics not talked about in the light of day I'm your host Brandon gartley sitting here and sitting on a plane somewhere on its way to the heartline is my co-host Greg Adams Woodford so in addition to me flying solo as a host today we're trying something a little different uh We've uh Gone mobile with the agile after dark Apollo 13 Studios and we're doing another special episode uh because the one special episode we did was so such a hit we got requests to to try and do some more so what makes this so special is this evening we have an agile round table with two distinguished guests Shila ready and Steve Thomas nitt damaja was supposed to be uh joining us as well uh but we'll get him on a show in in short order uh when he's not uh having travel difficulties uh getting our way uh we also want to welcome our agile after dark studio audience who I know will be sitting on pins and needles to ask questions to our esteemed guests later on in the show all intros aside let's get started with this very special episode so we kind of have two voyages that are converging in our studio tonight I'd like to start with Shila readyy who amongst her many achievements uh was part of our show titled transformation more than meets the eye uh that was before we had the Apollo 13 Studio set up so uh we have her ready uh no pun intended uh with uh this this uh mobile Studio because uh she is allergic to the agile after dark uh cats so hopefully this will be a little less itchy and scratchy for her personally and uh with a mobile Studio we might have a few little bits of interference so hopefully it's not too uh Scratchy on the listener's end welcome Shila thank you Brandon thank you our other distinguished guest is Steve Thomas Steve has been nice enough to come back to Agile after dark after joining us on our episode about devops which by the way I get feedback all the time about it being so helpful as a way to break down kind of all the the pieces of that and he he is also a regular contributor on our additional shows that have been I have to say completely serious at all times welcome back Steve yeah they've been really serious okay I think minutes and minutes of laughter that we've had to edit out and it's still minutes and minutes of laughter uh as we try to keep ourselves together distinguished guest makes me sound really gray and I'm wondering well I am so you know let's get over it it's it's a good thing Steve it's a good thing me get a drink okay so we'll start with you Shila Shila has a be in mechanical engineering from kakaya University am I saying that right how do you say that um kakaa Kaka University and she also has a Masters of Science and industrial engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology as well as a slew of certifications going from PMP tobc so I kind of want to start with you Shila in terms of kind of getting into it uh my first question to you is what has been the biggest change you've seen in delivering software since your University days the biggest change um so I was really lucky I joined in the dot era um that was my first job in New York City um it was great time it was a great time um I was doing my masters and pursuing a full-time job uh and I'll say the biggest change from then to now we were working on a coffee Exchange Trade exchange site back then in the do era and you know now as I look at software development I think the the focus on humans um from you know when it was the dot era you know I'm a Y2K graduate so you guys know Sur SC I did um and it was all about the machines then and you can see with my degrees it was all about the machines um but it's been a great ride since um and you know keeping in touch with humanity and bringing the human touch back into what we do um I think has been the biggest change and that's really what um keeps me uh moving in this particular job so interesting the kind of the trans ation of the machines and all being about the machines and about the people yeah so my masters was intive production systems which is you know um All About lean manufacturing and you know how you apply process and all of this good stuff U and here my partner uh is the Six Sigma guy and the cmmi guy so she's not talking about me by the way yeah yeah talking about Steve but you know um processes process processes will evolve mhm um it's really paying attention to the humans around you to make sure that you're able to evolve the process successfully I think it it takes that that eye and it takes that touch if Greg was here he'd be like so many PW so many PW I don't know if I can handle it all right so move to people or process people and process PP yeah so so much the people side I think is actually a good p word all right and so we have Steve as Greg likes to say look at the big brain on this guy Thomas has an undergraduate degree in Applied Mathematics from carnegi Mellon and a masters in computer science from the Ohio State University that's a shout out Steve you're GNA have to give me props for that Steve to has a variety of certifications and has worked in everything from robotics to Telecom to software delivery and devops Steve I'd like to ask you given your varied background in types of systems what are some of the common threads you see in delivering stuff quote unquote stuff using agile so delivering stuff is the common themes yeah like from robotics to Telecom to the software that you're you know you're seeing now the main frames infrastructure like you've kind of seen it all so I'm kind of curious about some of those common themes that you've kind of seen throughout the throughout the process all right another few word yeah process yeah another um yeah so it's interesting the the good one the good systems of course I mean we've all seen all of the the statistics or whatever but the number of projects or software projects or efforts that fail to liver on their you know expected or planned results um and I have seen sadly more you know plenty of my share of that um over the years um the what works well is what we found in agile you know which is okay the primary measure of progress is working product working so whether it's Hardware or robotics or whatever yeah working stuff demonstrating it on a regular basis to the people who care about it you know to the people who consume it is and getting that fast feedback that has been um of course there are no silver bullets but that's been pretty close to you know the discipline you know because it is a discipline that has made the biggest difference in projects you know in in software efforts uh not just software but Hardware in Telecom and in robotics you know efforts that yield results you know and so that's the common thing that I'm seeing yeah and there's a lot of things obviously as we' talked about in previous podcasts and like in conversations with the two of you and others is we getting that fast feedback there's various ways and tools and processes if you will in order to get us there right but the overall concept of getting things out more quickly because Market changes right right you got competitors right um and so I I kind of open it up to something we were talking about today was the the notion U with one of the the people we were interviewing was with leveraging Lean Startup you know so the notion of it's not just about getting the the product or the software out there but it's also so how do you learn as an organization so what is the key learning so you can experiment and adapt and show that to your the consumers who are consuming that um on a regular basis and learn something from it even if you're not putting it into production right right and sorry I give a little cheers to my microphone there unfortunately in the middle of Steve's conversation so uh another aspect of the the growth mindset right so it's developing a learning organization but it's also about the growth mindset that the individuals in the organization have to start to develop right it's about personal growth it's about leadership growth it's about the ability to have the humility to actually learn from failure right and to talk about failure as an organization not in a negative connotation but a way to learn right all of these contribute to that growth mindset um and that's really what you know the essence of the work that we're doing in this next generation of coaching um that's really what we're helping the organizations with how do you develop that learning mindset as as Steve was talking about yeah and that's the you you bring up a great point because you know I you know talked about your guys background my background was in like education po uh policy and pedagogy right in terms of the different ways that people learn right and for me it's always been kind of interesting evolution of how we've approached looking at as you said shla kind of we have this technology and these systems and like that's the thing that we're concentrating on rather than how do we look at the people that are involved and and get them you know to understand how they work as a system as people yes right and working within those those systems right right both how they learn individually you know their individual learnings and then organizationally what does it take for the organization to become a learning organization and one that um encourages the individuals in the organization to be learning and in uh inspecting adapting pivoting in what they do yeah and it's that uh continual Improvement right as a group but also as an individual right yeah right all right well uh we're going to transition to a quick break and get into some of the hard questions yeah I thre out some softballs there after uh some intros but uh please uh send your feedback to feedback agilea dark.com and also go to agilea dark.com to see previous episodes that both Shila and Steve have been in [Music] teaser yeah so we kind of moved move the studio down because we have some allergies to our all my fault no no no it's sas's fault it is a little sassa's fault a lot of it like it is sass she does tear the studio down quite a bit like that's kind of her thing saying effing St yeah for s s that's right what the hell is wrong with you [Music] all right so uh we are back and as uh per tradition with agile after dark we kind of wanted to go around the room to the guest and talk about what is that we're drinking tonight um I think I can actually speak for Steve and Shila uh we we got a a nice 2016 Mero uh thought it was a 14 oh is it a 14 yeah is it a 14 I think so oh wow I got I went I went you went I went all out you went you know with the big guns I went for the big guns the truth is I picked the Mero that actually had a screw top on it because I wasn't sure that my wine oper actually worked so both shalot and Steve are partaking in that and uh doing a little shout out to to Greg since he's not here uh G drink of choice of course is maker neat I'm doing on the Rocks because well he probably would have some comments on why I'm doing that but I'll leave it at that so I wanted to to continue on uh in terms of our conversation um and really speak to the two of you kind of you know when you guys can kind of react to to what we're talking about but given the vast experience that the two of you have with you know uh delivering system Solutions I think uh our audience would like to know how were how we achieve success in delivering work product in an agile way specifically what do you two see as the biggest struggles for organizations in their agile Journey big the biggest struggle is going to be leadership leadership okay over and over again kind and that's kind of what we see in terms of the like the version one surveys and so forth but right can you speak specifically to some of the examples that you guys have run into without giving names uh in terms of those those situations where it really has been a hindrance so number one leadership mindset um the ability to Inspire your people as a leader and this is nothing to do with being an agile leader you know this has nothing to do with a particular methodology it's just leadership 101 it's the ability to have Clarity in a vision and it's the ability to inspire your people and motivate your people to go towards that Vision To Go Achieve that Vision um these are some basic things that we're beginning to realize um that people actually lack and they don't lack they don't have training that can help them in in such a basic thing uh we you know partly we're guilty about that right we approach agile transformation from the bird's eye view of we you know train them in agile stuff this is a new term by the way brand a AES um we teach them how to do yeah we it's it's all about the doing it's not about the being MH um ground we we we Inspire them in our own way we motivate them to model you know Behavior after some of the behaviors that we are modeling but what happens when we leave that organization right does it sustain does that change sustain so so if you go back to really and you know I'm 100% guilty of this as I go back to all my initial coaching days um you know I have to sit down and question was I really coaching or was I just mentoring and did I leave the scene you know uh having just mentored a few people did I really touch lives did I really improve did I give them that ability to as we say in our world fish as opposed to catching the fish and and feeding them the fish right or sharing my fish even worse yeah um so yeah I mean leadership just just basic leadership what does it mean to be a good leader uh and above and beyond that once you're able to be a true servant leader which is what the stuff takes and a you know a true change in mindset really demands that you are a very good you know servant leader servant first leader next right you know I I find it interesting because I agree wholeheartedly with the overall concept of servant leader and I think somewhere in the definition it does talk about a servant leader being someone that's inspiring I think I feel like we focus a lot on servant leadership in terms of backing off from the program and the teams and saying kind of let them do their thing but you were you brought up a really good point in terms of really articulating that vision and how we work with those leaders because whether it be Pi planning or if even that doesn't exist basically saying to the team and the programs and what have you saying this is what we want to do we're pumped up about it we think that you can deliver as as teams to get us there you know let's let's go like kick some butt right and take names and and as an agile Community we've been really effect ineffective at communicating with the leadership level about the changes in mindset that they need to have at that level so that they read in a Airline magazine about agile or they read in Harvard Business review or whatever um and they're like yeah that's that's the latest thing that I need to adopt is agile and they're of course perceiving that it's at a team level at their worker be level that the change needs to happen and they're like okay great I will and they're willing to pay the money they're willing to bring us in they're willing to send their people to training but what they're not seeing they don't have a vision for is this is going to be a change in mindset a change in perspective of us as Leaders you know Steve and Charla you you bring up a lot of good points around this and we don't do a lot of name dropping on agile after dark but Martin fer uh who we we all know is one of the the minds behind the agile Manifesto recently did a keynote at agile Australia on the state of agile software in 2018 and you know in that he stated we we've come a long way from introducing agile Concepts from the hippie dippy Barefoot like Steve walking around on the grass Concepts um but at the same time he said he used words like having to deal with faux agile right and one of the ones that I really loved as a history buff is he he used a concept and in a in a phrase of of the agile industrial complex I like that I like that right taylorism and agile which you know basically gets us to and Greg bless his heart he's on a plane trying to get to the Heartland had mentioned on a previous podcast that you know we had talk through a little bit as it is agile after dark but are we getting to the point where we are just replacing process with process and and I open that to to you two in terms of what you've seen at all levels in relation to this we are seeing an awful lot of replacing process with process and that does go back to the lack of leadership you know leadership not understanding what the real transformation is about excuse me and it's also um what we have enabled you we have fed into that of okay um let me provide you XYZ training let me do some Team level coaching let me do um you know put in play put install this uh this framework this you know whatever it's all there we've we've led into that same process and and we arrive and they're like yeah we're doing agile right that's kind of the full agile right I mean that's kind of what we're running into a lot where we've gotten past the it'll never work we've been doing waterfall forever I got my backlog in a tool therefore I'm agile y EX exactly yeah so we were in some interesting conversations and um it's exactly right um have we replaced process with more process and more process and the answer is yes um we've moved away supposedly from the waterfall days and the waterfall processes only to be replaced with agile looking agile feeling agile that's where the word comes from terminology we use agile terminology yeah so therefore we're agile right right but I I want to acknowledge that you know it takes a true human spirit and it takes a true leader to be able to stand up and say you know what I'm willing to change MH I am willing to demonstrate the new behaviors it's going to take that this change is going to take I am willing to to model and it's okay if I fail right at least I would have learned something from that that's a huge obstacle it is and that's what it's really going to take for us to break away from process to process at the core of it that is what true transformation is all about right it starts within and it's it's kind of scaling those just the key manif and that's one of the things that fell talked about is we didn't get into details on purpose you know you can any team any organization but almost from a team to Team level like they need to figure out whatever the structure is for them to reach these things that we put out there but it shouldn't necessarily be prescriptive right so um I agree that it is about the leadership so but what we have failed as agile coaches and a as agilist to to clarify is that we have not addressed the system that those leaders exist in they um and I was fortunate a number of years ago to do I was was early on in my agile career and was doing some training for a VP and he pushed back on me and said you don't understand I kind of like being a commanding I like being able to tell people what to do and have them and see them do it and I was able to get into understand his environment how he had been promoted the ecosystem that he existed in and as angelist we preach a message to leadership but we rarely get into to their space and can really effectively coach them or even Mentor them to how should they become true agilists if not even servant leaders well yeah and that's that was going to be my question is is that is that really the goal is servant leadership or agilists or at their level their goal is to become to focus on business agility so as a business we need the flexibility adaptability but we're we're an agile after dark so business agility is a thing that gets thrown about quite a bit right so I you know to if Greg were here he'd be like literally like fuming and like you know smoke coming out of his ears and he be drinking his you know but so so it's it's about being able to sense and respond right fundamentally at the root level that's what you're trying to build as a capability within an organization and it's not easy right um we're talking about not a team you're not working with a team that has you know um a mission in front of it and for them to just you know adopt it and move with it and grow with it we're really talking about individuals within an organization and you know what I fully acknowledge we haven't done a great job as coaches to really cater to the problem of okay there's this group of management here we are talking about leadership and there's a time in place for both to coexist Within organization it doesn't do us any good as Steve was saying to focus on one or the other and not understanding the system within which they're playing if you're just locally optimizing for a manager versus leadership or the other way around and you're really not understanding how they came to be the way they you know today it's hard you have to look at it from A System's point of view and understand what is going on and what does the system want at this moment and K that yeah and you know Greg and I in past podcast that talked about common sense Advanced common sense and stupid right and you know it the the scale and I said to him I was like well isn't stupid at the you know before Common Sense he's like no it's on both ends yeah yeah yeah right so whether it's identifying with leadership to say you know you kind of have a sense of certain leadership you know kind of keep with that but you need to be able to articulate what the vision is for the team because they need that they need to be able to come to work every day and say this is why I'm doing the work that I'm doing perfect example of stupid on the other end of the spectrum is okay I'm a great servant leader and therefore I will not make any decisions right not useful as a leader leading an organization of 100 plus people right right so it's on both ends you have to have a balanced way of doing things and you know what I've seen over my career um especially in the space of it and I've been in it organizations all my career we haven't done a great job of bringing up our leaders yeah right and I see the counterparts on the business side and I always see they're a notch above right they're always up to date be it their training be it their mentoring be it coaching be it one-on-one coaching be it team coaching right there's always a leg up in terms of leadership here we were reward aing whoever the best performer was whoever the expert was and those guys became the de facto leaders well that's not serving our teams because that's not the need of the day today I think that's the Steve's point where we kind of have to do an evaluation of kind of the leadership role within organizations that are now doing agile right versus being agile and so that's some of the thing that fer talked about with the agile Industrial complex which is you know okay I'm a leader you know and so my roles change a little bit but we've talked in previous podcasts and and CH you know this from organizational change management part is Performance Management you know if I'm still being reviewed on a yearly basis based on how many widgets and I've talked about this on several podcasts mostly because my wife's IO psychology stuff and it's always top of mind but I do think that there's from a leadership standpoint being able to recognize that and say part of the tenants of agile is regular feedback right and and the when I mentioned before the ecosystem that leaders exist in HR is a part of it but it's actually relatively small part they are driven by what's their compensation model absolutely and what's you know because they've succeeded to get to that level by paying attention to what's going to be rewarded in this organization and they're trying not to get sued that's the big thing it's like how many you know things we need to keep track some of the other dimensions that come into their ecosystem is what do my peers do what do my peers say my boss think about things um and so they are how I get here right exactly what what were the elements that got me to this position they are more keenly aware of all of those factors than say your average developer your average tester because they successfully got to that level in the organization by paying attention to those things right so I'm hearing leadership is kind of the one of the main sort of things that we're still challenged with you know to to f also right uh when I look back at some of the shining star yeah shining star success examples they were successful because of good leadership because you know the leader was willing to say I want a model I want to take you out to the recruitment center I want you to see the pain my people face and I will be there with you I will stopwatch what can I do right to help ease the pain of my people right so it it definitely takes you know that kind of courage and that kind of vision to be a successful leader so when you see successful agile Transformations I challenge you to go all the way up to look at what is the leadership line and what are some key Behavior trades and I I'm willing to bet my last dollar you know you will you will find common patterns yeah so along those lines I'll switch gears here a little bit and say kind of as a follow-up question to that what are you two most excited about in the agile space you know my answer my the thing that's most exciting to me is is the shift the last few years into devops into marrying the Ops perspective you know to get the fast feedback into an organization so the organizations that have truly embraced that that has been a huge game Cher but not just giving it a name and saying oh yeah we're doing that no no no not devops label but those that really are uh Maring up not setting up a separate Ops Dev Ops Team but those who are Maring up you know pairing up their Ops people with their Dev people and saying we're going to put produ we're going to put uh our uh product into production on a frequent basis and we're going to uh automate the putting it in the production and we're going to automate the evaluation of how well it's doing that has been I mean it's it's just uh for me that's been a huge game changer and the tooling on the Ops side that the dev Dev side is not aware of and the we talked about the in the dev ope I really high highly recommend people go listen to that because I've heard from M People of the now we're up to 10 listeners by the way of the 10 listeners that we've had they have actually said you know that's one of the best like explanations of it and part of it is that I I actually talked about in a workshop I did a couple weeks ago was when you bring those two together and now the dev has like the push button where they can go all the way to a production like environment or production when they go to push the button they're like yeah do I really want to push that button the devs start to hesitate it's like oh they've been pushing Ops why you take so long why you take so long it's like oh my God uh yeah now I'm ready to hit the yeah exactly yeah so not to to one up Steve but what what excites me the most is really the biz Dev Ops right it's concept to production to the point we get feedback either positive or negative and while doing that still having happy people at the end of the day right that we don't have burnt out people that we don't have people at each other's throats right that doesn't take people you know 3 Days To recover if I put something in production um or it doesn't take you know people dreaming about great ideas that customers can really use but not being sure should I invest should I go all in because it's going to take forever for that feedback to come right right so so it's having that happiness that motivation that joy that brings people to work every single day of the week right to to come in and put their best foot forward and as your wife would tell you you know Happy People positive people bring more creativity yeah and just watching that really brings a lot of Happiness to me she'd also say happy wife happy life yes she probably say that as well right we got cheers from the studio here right yeah um but uh you know I mean I think you know along these lines in the previous podcast we talked with uh reender about kind of group development and so forth and these all these different levels and um willham or I can't remember Susan willhem I think we like did the study on that in terms of the different levels of you know group development and you get kind of that last level and you see what we had talked about is when we talked to a lot of people like you ever seen a a team that really gets it really just working they have the high capacity they can take on anything like kind of along those lines of we love what we do bring it where's the challenge I don't see it you know all right well that seems a good uh place to wrap up part one of inside Apollo 13 Studio the agile Round Table uh I highly recommend you check out part two where we get to ask some of the hard questions of our esteemed guests and not just from me as as your host but also from the agile after dark studio uh studio audience where they'll be able to to jump in and ask some questions as well I highly recommend you check it out and as always please feel free to send any feedback to feedback at agilea dark.com and check out other podcasts that we've done at agilea dark.com you know what it is it's a Mero with a Twist top because my wine opener broke so that's what it is I've got a wine opener down here oh yeah I didn't think of that yeah you didn't think of that well the funny thing is cuz like Steve likes to be like well don't take any wine that's not over two years old D and then at the one the transformation one that shil was here for we're like what are you drinking box wine he's like well yes yes I am yes they make very good box yes they do was it over 2 years old you know they don't the the boxes ah the cardboard in the Box the truth and aile after dark comes out that's right