Mary Poppendieck – Leadership and Self-Organizing Teams – Incompatible or Synergistic?

• Leader’s job is to keep the team from their comfort zone!
  Too often – espeacially small – teams are aiming for consensus – leaving out most of the wisdom that individuals have. The leader has to ask unpleasant questions.
• What differentiates a team from a workgroup is ‘common purpose’.
  A workgroup or committee is a group of people doing work together – but they don’t necessarile have the same goal. A team by definition is a group of people working together towards a shared vision or goal – common purpose.
• Teams are dependant on their ability to make good decisions. And good decisions need:
  1) Diversity of opinions – all people participate in decision making
  2) Independence – team members may not be dependant on each other
  3) Decentralization – tema members are needed to have different specializations
  4) Aggregation – team must be able to draw conclusion from diverse opinions that come from different expertises
• Team need two kinds of leadership:
  Competence leadership – like a master teacher who tells you how to play violin
  Product champion- like a  band leader wo is guiding the whole group
• Competence leader assists in specialization while product champion helps in aggregation
• There are two types of management: 1) Mission command and 2) Detailed command
• In agile and lean development, mission command is what we need.
• Mission commanders job (leader) is to
  1) State intent
  2) Set the tone & tempo
  3) Make better people
  4) Improve the system
• Always consider the cultural aspects of any organization and remember that different countries have totally differnet biases on what’s acceptable and what’s not.
• When reading ANY theory, always consider in what country the author was raised up.
• Lean originates from Japan, Agile originates from US

Jim Coplien – Why Lean and Agile are in conflict, and how to resolve the conflicts

• Scrum is not about some fancy practises
• Even the much touted Nokia test doesn’t guarantee real, suscesful Scrum implementation
• Lean is meant to deal with complicated things while agile is meant to deal with complex things
• Productivity is actually waste! It causes queues and inventories. You need to concentrate on ROI and the flow of value through the whole stream
• Agile is about “doing just enough to get just enough quality” while lean is about “doing the least you can to achieve excellence”
• Irritating fact, that seems amazingly commonly to be surprise: A hope is not a plan.
• Scrum is not about 30% not even 100% of improvement. It’s about 2-3 orders of magnitude improvement when done correctly

Petri Heiramo – Scrum from the customer point of view

• First impressions: weird terminology and a little common ground
• Key benefits
  1) Improved communication
  2) Better visibility
  3) Enabling changing requirements
  4) Faster feedback
  5) Building quality in
  => Higher ROI
• Success and value cannot be managed through cost. Instead, focus on
  1) User research&business analysis
  2) Competence & motivation of team members
  3) Amount of knowledge generated in every iteration
  4) Ability to incorporate cost
  => Focus on value
• Research is completely different from development. You cannot estimate research.
• Start from the definion of value and aim only towards generating more of it
• Software should not be buyed be spec but by a vision instead.
• Buying on spec causes higher cost, lower value and loss of knowledge between different phases of the project
• You need continuous integration at project level, especially on multi-supplier projects
• Never fix scope on a contract, even if cost and duration are fixed
• Enable changes and early termination
• The finnish acquisiotion law actually do not state you need waterfall. It especially makes it possible to avoid so called “open conduct” and use a “negotiative conduct” instead whenever the nature of purchase is such that the requiremetns cannot be clearly stated beforehand.

Karl Scotland – Five steps to kanban

1. Map the value stream
2. Visualize it
3. Limit work in progress
4. Establish cadence (pull system doesn’t need timeboxing!)
5. Reduce the kanban tokens

• You need to keep the work flowing, not the workers busy
• Ideally, development of a new feature doesn’t start before customer has paid for it.
• Visualize the work in progress and gradually limit the number of work items in progress
• Ideally the whole team works on a single story all the time.

Ari Tikka – Understanding power

• ‘Power distance’ is an important aspect of everyday life
• It’s easy to be dependant on other people
  - The other will take care of me
  - I don’t have to decide
  => A tempting trap
• Use of power is often constraining the system. There are two types of constraining.
• Productive constraining. Like timeboxing – constrains the time axis
• Bad constraining. Like micro-management that amplifies power distance and adds friction. Or conflict avoidance, which results in weaker decisions.

Bonus Panel – why bother with agile?

The discussion went “a bit” off-topic, but interested discussion whatsoever

• Agility started from software development, now we need to get higher in the corporate culture
• Agile practises have worked long time, long before agile was a buzzword.
• The only companies that will survive are those capable of changing rapidly
• We are pretty good at looking into the future – but too often forget that the future will not stay the same!
  Also, we feel unpleasant to look back into the past – which is where we could learn
• Waterfall has itäs place and works in simple projects. Complex projects are where you need something more and agility may work. In chaotic circumstances nothing will survive.
• The biggest mistake we made was to plan year-long projects at the day-level detail.
• The trend is towards smaller teams, where everyone is required to participate in decision making. There’s no room for just hanging around.

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