19 May 2020
*Covid is a fictional character based on my imagination that represents the strain of CoronaVirus that is causing the disease Covid-19. This article discusses Business Agility and why some organizations are not able to reap the benefits Scrum has to offer. […]
15 May 2020
*Covid is a fictional character based on my imagination that represents the strain of CoronaVirus that is causing the disease Covid-19. This article discusses how Trust can bring transparency an absolutely essential ingredient for empiricism. […]
04 Mar 2018
As an Agile Coach, you frequently encounter situations which demand quick thinking to get things moving in the right direction. Over time I have found few techniques which come out handy and always keep these in my playbook in case need arise. This is first part in the series of tools that I have found useful in my role as Agile Coach – 5 Whys.
Brief History – This technique was originally developed by Sakichi Toyoda and was used within the Toyota Motor Corporation during the evolution of its manufacturing methodologies. It is a critical component of problem-solving training, delivered as part of the induction into the Toyota Production System.
Purpose – 5 whys can be used for:
Description – Discuss with team members to look at the issue and ask “Why?” up to five times to get beyond habitual thinking. It is imperative to distinguish causes from symptoms and pay attention to the logic of cause-and-effect relationship to identify the root cause. Be empirical in the investigation by leveraging the facts for decision-making.
Example – An issue identified is “poor Sprint Planning”. Let’s find the root cause for this problem.
So the real root cause for poor Sprint Planning was no accountability of the Product Backlog Refinement meetings. It is very important to identify the root cause, come out with action items for improvement, identify an accountable person from the Scrum Team and agree on the expected time frame for putting the improvements into practice.
Have you used this technique to identify the root cause of any problems? If yes, please share your story.
References –
Scrum Insights for Practitioners – Hiren Doshi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys – Wikipedia
Agile Retrospectives – Esther Derby, Diana Larsen
09 Jan 2017
Dear Hiren,
Classrooms can survive without iPads, phones or even without any power point based training presentation for that matter, but never without inspirational teacher like you.
One of the way to look at it, this was just 2 days of training event just like other events those keep coming in our journey, but the way it was executed by you, I am sure these memories will last forever.
Instead of leading us by holding our hands, you asked us to walk ahead while you caringly observed from behind.
On behalf of VW team I would like to say big Thank you!
Thanks & Regards,
Milind Nanal
Chief Information Security Officer (CISO)
25 Aug 2016
Here’s what the Scrum Guide says about the Product Owner Role:
“The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product and the work of the Development Team. How this is done may vary widely across organizations, Scrum Teams, and individuals.”
Who is an effective Product Owner in Scrum? Is (S)He a requirements typist, user story writer, business analyst, domain expert, maybe all of the above? What are some effective practices of Product Ownership? What are the biggest myths and misconceptions around Product Ownership?
Five of the most respected Scrum.org PSPO Trainers – Ralph Jocham, Mark Noneman, Erik Weber, Hiren Doshi, and Simon Reindl talk and answer questions on Product Ownership myths, misconceptions and mysteries of Product Ownership.
27 Feb 2016
This video captures the feedback from the students on the Professional Scrum Foundation workshop facilitated in India. The students share their learnings on how writing granular user stories, story splitting, defining clear Scrum roles helps with agility. They talk about values and principles like self-organization, empowerment, Courage and Respect needed to embrace Agility. They also talk about the interactive and intensive, hands-on and powerpoint free facilitation of this PSF workshop.
20 Feb 2016
The Agile Adoption Strategy used at LULU included Agile Readiness Assessment, The Scrum | Agile Training, Story writing workshops, Distributed team Alignment, Re-structuring, Facilitating a Sprint, Team Building Activities, and open workshop.
16 Feb 2016
The feedback is for the Scaled Professional Scrum workshop from Scrum.org that I facilitated in Mumbai on January 9th and January 10th.
The feedback is given by Parag Barve, Ajay Solanki, Prasad Kamath and Syed Ali.
20 Mar 2015
To imbibe Agility in an organization which is a state of high responsiveness, speed, and adaptiveness organizations should promote a new organizational culture of openness, transparency, respect for people, constant learning, improving, and constant adaptation. Even with so much of awareness, cultural change seems to be one of the major hurdles impeding organization’s success.
Culture is more about “The ideas, customs, and social behavior of a particular people or society.” When an individual behaves in a particular way, we associate that to be his nature, but when a team or an organization responds, we relate to its culture. As this is associated with people and their entrenched culture it is very difficult to change!! While it is also a very common observation that the culture within the same organization varies across various geographies. It’s not uncommon to hear statements like that’s the UK Culture, or the US Culture, or the Indian Culture, etc.
When a team/group of cross-functional individuals work together (co-exist and collaborate) for a long period of time in the same organization by respecting and following certain organizational values; they display a unique identity of that group forming their culture. And when we address the culture exhibited by all the teams in an organization it is referred to as the organization culture. If you observe carefully, culture is not the characteristic of one individual but of the team/organization as a whole.
I recollect one of my consulting experiences where I was hired as a coach in one of the organizations that had been practicing Agile for a while, but their adoption was stalled. Although from the outset they seemed to follow all the Agile best practices, they were still struggling with the deliveries and their team motivation was at a all time low. One of the first things I did was to probe the teams by facilitating Anonymous Retrospectives to generate insights. It was quite revealing to find that the organization had a “Culture of Fear”; fear of getting penalized for a decision going wrong, fear failure to meet the commitments, fear of poor quality deliverable, fear to be completely honest and transparent, fear to challenge the status-quo, fear of lack of trust and respect among people, etc. This culture of fear in the organization did not allow Agile to penetrate beyond the surface. Once these insights were shared with the organization, they embraced and acknowledged the shortcomings and worked towards corrective practices to remove the fear thereby imbibing the “Culture of Agility” in the organization.
Organization culture contributes significantly towards successful Agile adoption and therefore understanding it is the key. Management, executives, and team members should support and embrace this change. Invest in a few prominent agility attributes like the healthy team dynamics of self-organization teams, continuous improvement, frequent delivery, effective communication, adapting to the changing environment, etc. that benefits an organization and its customers. To bring culture shift, organizations must examine its existing practices with a critical eye, try new way of doing things, create new opportunities, coupled with commitment and nurturing at all levels within an organization.
Organizations which have traversed through the Agile adoption culture change journey exhibit some of these characters:
Embedding cultural shift involves a lot of patience, a full top-down support, constant learning, and a bottom-up intelligence. While an organization may follow all the bookish guidelines and yet fail in this journey if they cannot identify this subtle/invisible ingredient of “culture” which plays a substantial role. Focusing on the correct culture, eventually leads an organization towards success in this transformation path!!