Agile Transformation

Reach one shared understanding of why things move so slowly.

We go deeper than thinking about what tools and templates are being used to set you up for a real agile transformation. Look at how becoming more agile is really implemented through behaviors, policies, communication, ways-of-working, team structures, and everything that matters.

What to expect

• Workshop 1: What is agile? What will our business look like if we become agile? This 4 hour "kickoff" workshop aligns tech and product leaders around core agile concepts.

• Workshop 2: What holds us back? We crawl through the fine-grained details of everything that holds your team back and we structure it into an easy-to-understand system. Once we have this shared understanding of how multiple problems can re-enforce other problems, we will explore how to break apart the system step-by-step. At the end of the session

What will we really talk about?

We’re aiming for the Agile as described in the Agile Manifesto, not as described by any pre-canned process. We take a first-principles approach and focus discussions around generating value early, slitting work up into thin slices, reducing hand-overs between silos, increasing shared context, increasing autonomy, and so on. We give your team a view of what agile principles are and why they matter. We explore everything that prevents your team from reaching those principles. At the end of the session your team will be given a process to use to change themselves incrementally. Nobody is dropping a big “change everything all at once“ project on your team here.

We’ll map out team structures, workflows, strategies, goals, cause-and-effect relationships, blockers to the 12 principles of the agile manifesto. We’ll identify challenges with communication, prioritization, collaboration, user feedback, skills, the way work is broken up, transparency, accountability, focus, and even end-to-end flow of work through the entire development process.

Send an email to book:
Brian@BuildingBetterTeams.de

How does it work?

📝 Get everyone aligned and united around exactly what holds the team back
✅ Entirely online
⏳2 half-day workshops
🤝 Set up a DIY process to lead the change yourself
🆙 For all tech and product leaders.

Your Facilitator

Brian Graham

What won’t you get?

• A prescription to “just use” SAFe, Scrum, Kanban, XP, Crystal, or any other packaged “playbook” style solution.

  • There’s a lot of “Agile Transformation” solutions out there that will try to roll out a pre-packaged “playbook” to describe how a company should work and what teams will do. Put simply, that approach rarely has results you can celebrate. It’s usually really expensive, and never really gets “done”.

  • We believe it is better for your team to make many incremental changes to the existing process to reduce risk and speed up the delivery of value. You know, agile style.

• A way to control the feature factory

  • A lot of waterfall environments ask for ways to improve performance and focus heavily on ways to reduce the autonomy of a software product team. They wish to make developers highly fungible and respond to requests to build specific features. This workshop won’t help you establish that practice.

• An overnight solution

  • Building agility is an ongoing process of reacting to and adapting around an ever changing environment, and ensuring your teams are set up to stay agile. For companies leaving a feature-factory situation, this can take 6 months before new habits don’t need constant re-enforcement. You will see results before 6 months, but this is the minimum effort to ensure that things do not “slip back” to the old way.

What do you need to bring?

Because this isn’t a lecture but really an interactive workshop, we’ll need you to bring a few things with you!

• We’ll get these details from a few 1:1 sessions with you and your team members a week or two before the workshop:

  • Data. We want to know how effective you are today at building software.

  • Context. We want to know how you build software today and how we get that working.

• The absolute basics of using Miro (drawing boxes, writing text, adding lines between boxes). You’ll need to draw!

• If the session is virtual, we need every participant to be on their own individual laptop. The poor sound quality and inability to participate when everyone gathers around one laptop in a conference room leads to a very poor experience for everyone.

Who should attend?

This workshop is aimed at tech teams inside startups (usually in a growth phase) with more than one team. To be successful, you should bring your technical and product leaders. If you want to change the team processes, they both need to be part of it.

More than just a workshop!

• Gain the tools and knowledge to transform your team towards agile, and keep them there.

• Interactive workshops in Miro lets every participant learn by DOING instead of just watching!

• In-person workshops available inside Germany and some EU countries

Have questions?

Just send Brian an email!:
brian@buildingbetterteams.de