Second Wednesday - 2011 Archive

Second Wednesdays - Agile and Lean Management Discussions over Breakfast - 2011 Archive

Backgound

The IndigoBlue Second Wednesdays are monthly breakfast discussions between Senior Business and IT Stakeholders in complex organisations. By invitation only and limited to 10 guests, the discussions are open and candid.

Format:

• Facilitated discussion / Breakfast briefing
• Starts at 08:00am, ending at 10:00am
• Hosted at Home House, 20 Portman Square, W1H 6LW

If you are interested in attending one of our Second Wednesday meetings or if you would like IndigoBlue to facilitate similar discussions within your organisation, please register your interest with Alban James:

Register Your Interest

2011 Topics:

• The ‘Agile PMO’, best or worst of both worlds?
• From Activism to Politics, Agile enters the Boardroom
• The CIO is dead, long live the CIO!
• Agile reporting for business sponsors
• Traditional IT Contracts are Doomed! | 2 Blog Posts
• Looking at IT Projects and Programmes as an Investment Portfolio | 2 Blog Posts
• Creating a Culture for Continuous Change
• Has Architecture & Design been lost in translation?
• Governance Challenges as IT becomes less Centralised | Blog Post
• Agile Treadmill, Command-and-Control in disguise?
• About Value Conversations and Organisational Efficiency

From a pure Agile perspective, the Programme Management Office (PMO) tends to undermine the alignment of accountability with responsibility. It intervenes in the collaborative relationships between those accountable for delivering an outcome and those sponsoring the delivery, resulting in poor decision taking, unnecessary risk and cost, and poor motivation in all project stakeholders. Still, some kind of function is required at a projects portfolio level, to prioritize the allocation of human and financial resources, and to act as mediation between projects protagonists and Enterprise Stakeholders. Should we name this function ‘the Agile PMO’ what would be its accountabilities and responsibilities?

Facilitator: Nigel Kneill

A common rhetoric at this year's Agile Business Conference was that Agile had become 'main stream' and was now a prevailing current of thought. What did people mean by this? Rightly or wrongly, Agile has predominantly been a bottom up dynamic. Operating primarily at the code and project level, zealous evangelists have promoted it as a panacea, as an article of faith with its inner-circle rituals. However, Agile’s underpinning dynamics of efficiency and risk management are equally attractive to Enterprise Stakeholders looking to unlock the value stream of major change programmes. Still ... with scale come compromises and politics. Can Agile successfully enter the boardroom and still come out recognizable to those who championed it in its early stages?

Facilitator: James Yoxall

The days of the technology focused CIO are long gone. The role of business leader is as important as the day job of ensuring the technology runs correctly. The day job is about developing capability to meet operational needs. The business leader works in collaboration with key stakeholders outside IT, to determine where to apply that capability taking into account priorities, risks and resources available. The ability to act responsively and effectively is a key component of the Agile mindset that helps the CIO to deliver both roles. This meeting will give peers the opportunity to share experiences of success and failure in these two complimentary areas, discuss how those can be characterised and, most importantly, predicted.

Facilitator: Chris Jones

Agile or iterative projects focus on frequent delivery of working software. This enables greater transparency by generating frequent early information about the capability of the project. Ideally, it also improves decision-making through better feedback. There are several challenges though. Firstly, the information generated by the project teams often requires translating and summarising in order to be relevant to sponsors and stakeholders. Secondly, if the information generated from the project is not what was hoped for then there can be a human tendency to "spin" or hide information. This meeting will invite peers to discuss ideas and share experiences on how to avoid those pitfalls and leverage Agile reporting to meet the requirements of business sponsors and Enterprise Stakeholders.

Facilitator: Benjamin Mitchell

Traditional "Supply of Goods" contracts make building a collaborative client/supplier relationship tough. The nature of the contract is to fix the requirements up front, agree delivery milestones and try to focus the team on delivering what has been defined up front. Given that being able to handle change and being responsive to customer's needs is the cornerstone of all agile and lean approaches to software development, how can a contract that actively discourages change help to build a long-term relationship with a supplier? Can IT procurement re-invent itself to push the boundaries of Agile beyond the enterprise and towards a community of partners?

Facilitator: John Wright

Using investment management techniques for the governance of IT delivery lifecycle is gaining a lot of traction. If anything, the ‘buy, hold or sell’ language is naturally engaging for senior business sponsors. At a deeper level, regularly bringing together key stakeholders during programme delivery to make decisions based on the value of IT spends, contributes to good risk management and quality assurance practices. However, IT projects are not self-contained financial products, and the knock on effects with their surrounding landscape can make a straight ROI rationale somewhat artificial to build. How can agile principles of value-based governance and stakeholder communication make the investment portfolio approach work?

Facilitator: Nigel Kneill

Corporate Culture is more often than not referred to as a hurdle for change. Indeed, the capability for complex organisations to constantly re-invent themselves seems constrained by cultural components such as behaviours, semantics or beliefs, and a reflection of those in their organizational and governance set-up. Can culture be purposely and directly influenced to make large organisations more agile, or is it merely an emerging by-product of innovative ways of working together within projects and programmes? Why bother about Culture?

Facilitator: Rob Smith

Agile relies heavily on concepts such as emergent design (where an overall design emerges while implementing small increments) and just-in-time design (where design is performed in parallel with implementation at the “last responsible moment”). Up-front architecture is not ruled out, but guidance is made on a sufficiency basis. This lack of a definitive approach often leads to key decisions about when and how architecture is done being based on the personalities involved. Can Risk—in all its guises, financial, technical, etc—be used as a focal point and arbitrator to drive effective governance and assess how much architecture and design is ‘just enough’?

Facilitator: James Yoxall

Traditionally, centralised IT departments have been focusing on economies of scale by pushing standards and rationalisation to the edges of complex organisations. There is an argument that this has often been at the expense of responsiveness and market intimacy. As a response, Agile lends itself to much more granular and decentralised organisational models, tacitly encouraging business stakeholders to regain ownership of programme delivery whilst pulling value from Corporate IT when needed. How can governance help accommodate the tactical efficiency of Agile with the strategic intent of reducing the IT chaos, and what role for Corporate IT?

Facilitator: Rob Smith

Agile comes with tons of literature on how to organise work at a very detailed level. How much of those activities are manifestations of an 'Agile Sub-Culture' aimed at integrating a growing workforce in need of a new religion? Can this relentless treadmill and its esoteric jargon stifle innovation and alienate the very people Agile purports to help? Is the mere adoption of behaviours and rituals without governance mechanisms intrinsically sufficient for supporting corporate goals and values?

Facilitator: Nik Silver

Implementing complex change programmes involves countless decisions at micro and macro levels. Whilst group decisions, by representing the perspectives of many stakeholders, typically lead to better decisions (than autocratic ones), they also imply a lengthier process which can defeat the purpose of efficiency. Whose perspective should then be included in which decisions to bring clarity and quality of thinking without diluting the fundamentals of leadership and accountability? The notion of 'value conversation' can prove a worthy guide for understanding the trade-offs between leveraging creative tensions within teams and recognising the need for separation of concerns.

Facilitator: Nigel Kneill

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