Work Different

First thing to note is there is a lot of interest in this conference. A line out the door kinda interest. Folks with stacks of tickets attending with teams of co-workers. I am overhearing conversations that people have come into town to attend this from as far as Pennsylvania.

A funny thing: the slide on the wall says logistics. This consists of a Twitter hashtag, WiFi info and coffee details (when the breaks will be). 😉 I am sitting by people from Nielsen, kind of interesting cuz they are all about data. Seems to be a pattern these days.

@boogie (Jeff Gothelf) is telling us they ran the conference itself as a Lean UX project, with a hypothesis (that people want a conference), iterations, user stories, etc.

First up, Eric Burd from The Ladders. Mentioned original conf was a 35-40 person meet-up, small.

Rolling out Agile in an organization. Set up the problem.

A business owner was not happy with the MVP. Thought original product that was too thin. We in the room “get it.”. We get Minimum Viable Product. We are talking to each other. How to get business people on board.

Issue with picking the destination vision thinking we will just pivot around.

The people in finance, sales, marketing, and rest of company. Shows tech and product off, practicing Agile / Lean product development. How to get them to buy in?

My a-ha: we are doing this at my company to some degree. (ps – worry re: risk if ID issues so stay a tad cloaked on this blog).

“Agile is about risk mitigation”
– won’t go to market with something people don’t want

Waterfall is about risk mitigation–and used in other parts of company:
Sales has deals, beginning middle end.
Marketing has campaigns.
Finance has budgeting cycles.
All behave waterfall because is risk management.

Showed waterfall for finance, marketing, etc.

Change happens when something needs to move: a fire or problem statement.

Ladders Started looking at morale of Dev team. Question is Dev team engaged? Are they happy? Producing best work of their lives? Survey Monkey of morale shoes before and after Agile – morale boost.

So start with problem statement.

Getting head of sales to listen to customers in focus groups do not happen. To sell Agile to execs has hired customers to come in and eat lunch and talk to execs about customer need for the product. Voice of customer is important but hard to get execs to listen, so? Have lunch!

Hearing out of mouth of Sales moves organization forward. If you get sales force to gather product issues, can use tat in Agile /Lean to move bar forward.

[What I love is the open-ness. No “secret sauce” thinking.]

Language is important. We need to discover their language sets. Instead of forcing them to learn language of lean. Talked about a Finance term called level-loading- which is actually a lean concept. So use their language.

Train Exec team. The Ladders did a personnae exercise w exec team. Goal was persons, but taught exec Agile. Shows what it means to do Agile.

Small Bites: Shall wins over Big Bang.

Ben Austin example for education reform. Convinced one school district to change. Parents Unionized and have bargaining rights. Created so much press the conversation changed. Buzz made it to legislature.

At work we decided to watch a very interesting webcast of a conversation with Eric Ries and Rally Software’s Founder Ryan Martens and CTO Zach Nies.  Eric Ries is the author of Lean Start-up, currently holding the 9th spot on the New York Times best-selling business book list; Rally specializes in software to help with Agile Development, kind of a Basecamp for Agile – if you’re a PM and know what I mean by “Basecamp.” For those who don’t, these are online tools for managing projects, tracking deadlines and to-do lists, etc.

I had just been talking with someone in the morning about the need to change mindset within companies to really find a way to “Work Different.” There’s a challenge with teams in getting folks to understand it is safe not to be told what to do at every step of the way.  What went unsaid in this conversation was brought out in the Lean/Agile webcast.  It all comes back to not feeling like you might lose your job if you take a risk.

The same idea about mindset came up in this webcast conversation as it relates to the entrepreneurial propensity towards taking risks.  The interesting dimension they discussed is what we, in the PM world, call “risk management.”  Meaning, when you’re facing the chance that all could fail and you want to say “I’m scared that [x condition] will cause [y result],” you say instead “There’s a risk of [y result] and here are the ways we can mitigate that.”  Risk management might not lead to innovation.  This is because the very hypothesis behind risk management is that you can and should head off failure.  With that approach, no wonder folks are scared to take a chance and try things.  Seems obvious, right, they don’t want to take the risk.  It comes back to a willingness to learn and to see past failures in Corporate America.
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