AgileDays 2019
On March 21-22, 2019, my colleagues and I attended the AgileDays 2019 conference, and I would like to talk a little about this.
Place: Moscow, International Trade Center
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AgileDays is an annual conference on flexible process management, which is being held for the 13th time. If you are not familiar with such concepts as “flat organization structure” and “team self-organization”, then I advise you to read about Agile.
The conference was held on two days: Thursday and Friday (agree that the successful completion of the work week is already on Wednesday).
The conference program consisted of almost 100 reports and master classes on various topics. The speakers were employees and managers of various companies who successfully use Agile approaches (ABBYY, Qiwi, HeadHunter, Dodo Pizza, ScrumTrek and others).
As a rule, the speech of one speaker took 45 minutes, at the end of which one could ask questions. Unfortunately, it was physically impossible to get to all the reports - performances were held simultaneously in different halls, so each of us had to choose where to go (we did not agree, but often our interests coincided).
How to choose where to go? First of all, we focused on the topic of the report. Some of them are more suitable for scram masters, others for product owners. There are those who are primarily interested in company executives. I do not know why, but the full house was on a presentation on the topic "How to ruin teamwork: a guide for the manager . " Apparently, the organizers did not count on such a rush, since the performance was in a relatively small press room (everyone probably wanted to quickly find out how to ruin their teams).
In between the performances, there were coffee breaks, where we would get together and discuss the speakers' speeches.
I will not say that the conference turned my mind over and made me reconsider the approaches to our work. Although, most likely, this is exactly what would have happened if a year ago our colleagues (or rather the management) also did not attend the similar event AgileDays 2018. It was from that moment (perhaps even a little earlier) that we embarked on the Agile transformation path and tried to apply certain principles and approaches that were told on the speeches.
This conference helped me to put in my head everything that I had heard before from the guys.
Here are the main (but not all) approaches to work that the speakers talked about in their monologues:
Each task, each feature released on the prod should have a certain benefit and value. Each team member must understand why and why he does it. No need to work for the sake of work, better go with colleagues to play football. (maybe you will come up with something good while kicking the ball).
Unfortunately, in our state. sector (and we are engaged in exactly the development for the state. Customer) is not always possible to determine the values ​​of specific features. Sometimes the task comes “from above” and it needs to be done, even if everyone understands that it is inappropriate. But we will try even in such situations to find the very "value of the product."
A lot of attention was paid to the self-organization of employees and teams in general. If a leader is constantly standing over you, he distributes tasks, “kicks you” and tries to control everything, then nothing good will come of it. Bad will be all.
It will be harder for you to grow and develop as a good specialist, and at some point the manager will still not be able to control all the processes (some of the information will be distorted according to the “broken phone” principle, the other will be completely out of sight). And what will happen when such a person (manager) goes on vacation or gets sick? Oh dear, the work will rise without him! (I don’t think that everyone wants exactly this).
The manager should be able to trust his employees and not try to be a “single point of entry” for everyone. Employees, in turn, should try to show initiative and show their interest in projects. Seeing this, and the manager will be much easier to get away from total control over all.
An autonomous team is primarily a self-organized team capable of fulfilling its goals (projects). The team chooses the ways to achieve them. She does not need an external manager who will indicate what and how to do it. All questions and concerns should be discussed jointly within the team. Yes, the team may (and should) go to the manager, but only if he understands that this issue cannot be solved within himself (for example, it is necessary to increase the team's resource in order to successfully complete / complete the project).
Avoiding the principle “I am the boss - you are subordinate” has a very positive effect on the climate inside the company. People begin to communicate more freely with each other, they cease to build conditional boundaries between themselves “well, he's the boss.”
When a company adheres to the principle of a “flat organization structure,” the position becomes a formality. The role of a person that he occupies in a team begins to come out on top, and it may be different for everyone: it may be a person who communicates with the customer and collects demands from him; it can be a scrum master who monitors team processes and tries to improve and optimize them.
Not left without attention and the issue of employee motivation.
Salary is not the only criterion that encourages a person to work. There are many other aspects that contribute to productive work. You need to communicate more with your employees (not only for work), trust them and ask for their opinions, keep feedback constantly. It's great when a “corporate spirit” appears in the team. You can create your own attributes, for example, a logo, t-shirts, caps (by the way, we already have this). You can try to organize corporate events, field trips and other things.
When it is pleasant and comfortable for a person to work in a team, then the work seems more interesting to him, he doesn’t have a thought “as soon as 6:00 pm to get out of here”.
It would seem that the HR service should be engaged in the search for new employees (they are exactly necessary for this) and the manager (he should also do something). So why should the team itself take part in this? She is already full of work on the project. The answer, in fact, is simple - no one knows better than the team itself what they want from the candidate. It is the team to work with this person in the future. So why not give her the opportunity to make this important choice for her?
It is the 21st century already and it is not at all necessary for each of us to go to the office by 9 am (especially if we are talking about the IT industry). You can work productively and from home. And if a person works from home, so what prevents him from working from home, but in another city or even in another country? That's right - nothing interferes.
The distributed team is good because you have more options to find the right employee for the necessary criteria (skills, experience, salary level). Agree, the choice of candidates throughout Russia will be significantly higher than within the city alone. Also significantly reduced the cost of such employees (office maintenance, equipment).
There is a negative point in such work - people do not see each other. It is very hard to work with a person with whom you are personally unfamiliar. Regular video calls and periodic joint corporate events (at least once a year) can easily solve this problem.
It sounds rather unusual, but believe me, in some companies it works. The approach is that each employee of the company has the opportunity to see how much his colleagues earn (! And even how much his management earns).
This is a rather complicated process and you need to move very gradually to move to open wages. First of all, it is necessary to equalize the salaries of employees, so that there is no situation when Vasya gets 5 rubles for the same job, and Peter - as many as 15. You need to be prepared to be able to answer such questions of your employees as “Why does Peter earn more than me” .
It is worth noting that the disclosure of salaries is only the tip of the iceberg. There are many other financial indicators, which will be useful and interesting to know the staff.
And finally (almost every speaker finished his speech this way): no need to think that a certain approach to the processes within the company and the teams will work 100% for everyone. If this were the case, everyone would have been successful long ago. You need to understand that we are all human and we are all different. Each of us needs an individual approach. Success is just to find this "your" key. If you are uncomfortable working on Scrum, do not force yourself and your team. Take, for example, Kanban. Maybe this is exactly what you need.
Try, experiment, make mistakes and try again, and then everything will work out for you.
Place: Moscow, International Trade Center
')
What is AgileDays?
AgileDays is an annual conference on flexible process management, which is being held for the 13th time. If you are not familiar with such concepts as “flat organization structure” and “team self-organization”, then I advise you to read about Agile.
How was it
The conference was held on two days: Thursday and Friday (agree that the successful completion of the work week is already on Wednesday).
The conference program consisted of almost 100 reports and master classes on various topics. The speakers were employees and managers of various companies who successfully use Agile approaches (ABBYY, Qiwi, HeadHunter, Dodo Pizza, ScrumTrek and others).
As a rule, the speech of one speaker took 45 minutes, at the end of which one could ask questions. Unfortunately, it was physically impossible to get to all the reports - performances were held simultaneously in different halls, so each of us had to choose where to go (we did not agree, but often our interests coincided).
How to choose where to go? First of all, we focused on the topic of the report. Some of them are more suitable for scram masters, others for product owners. There are those who are primarily interested in company executives. I do not know why, but the full house was on a presentation on the topic "How to ruin teamwork: a guide for the manager . " Apparently, the organizers did not count on such a rush, since the performance was in a relatively small press room (everyone probably wanted to quickly find out how to ruin their teams).
In between the performances, there were coffee breaks, where we would get together and discuss the speakers' speeches.
And what useful we have learned
I will not say that the conference turned my mind over and made me reconsider the approaches to our work. Although, most likely, this is exactly what would have happened if a year ago our colleagues (or rather the management) also did not attend the similar event AgileDays 2018. It was from that moment (perhaps even a little earlier) that we embarked on the Agile transformation path and tried to apply certain principles and approaches that were told on the speeches.
This conference helped me to put in my head everything that I had heard before from the guys.
Here are the main (but not all) approaches to work that the speakers talked about in their monologues:
Product value
Each task, each feature released on the prod should have a certain benefit and value. Each team member must understand why and why he does it. No need to work for the sake of work, better go with colleagues to play football. (maybe you will come up with something good while kicking the ball).
Unfortunately, in our state. sector (and we are engaged in exactly the development for the state. Customer) is not always possible to determine the values ​​of specific features. Sometimes the task comes “from above” and it needs to be done, even if everyone understands that it is inappropriate. But we will try even in such situations to find the very "value of the product."
Self-organization and autonomous teams
A lot of attention was paid to the self-organization of employees and teams in general. If a leader is constantly standing over you, he distributes tasks, “kicks you” and tries to control everything, then nothing good will come of it. Bad will be all.
It will be harder for you to grow and develop as a good specialist, and at some point the manager will still not be able to control all the processes (some of the information will be distorted according to the “broken phone” principle, the other will be completely out of sight). And what will happen when such a person (manager) goes on vacation or gets sick? Oh dear, the work will rise without him! (I don’t think that everyone wants exactly this).
The manager should be able to trust his employees and not try to be a “single point of entry” for everyone. Employees, in turn, should try to show initiative and show their interest in projects. Seeing this, and the manager will be much easier to get away from total control over all.
An autonomous team is primarily a self-organized team capable of fulfilling its goals (projects). The team chooses the ways to achieve them. She does not need an external manager who will indicate what and how to do it. All questions and concerns should be discussed jointly within the team. Yes, the team may (and should) go to the manager, but only if he understands that this issue cannot be solved within himself (for example, it is necessary to increase the team's resource in order to successfully complete / complete the project).
Flat organization structure
Avoiding the principle “I am the boss - you are subordinate” has a very positive effect on the climate inside the company. People begin to communicate more freely with each other, they cease to build conditional boundaries between themselves “well, he's the boss.”
When a company adheres to the principle of a “flat organization structure,” the position becomes a formality. The role of a person that he occupies in a team begins to come out on top, and it may be different for everyone: it may be a person who communicates with the customer and collects demands from him; it can be a scrum master who monitors team processes and tries to improve and optimize them.
Team motivation
Not left without attention and the issue of employee motivation.
Salary is not the only criterion that encourages a person to work. There are many other aspects that contribute to productive work. You need to communicate more with your employees (not only for work), trust them and ask for their opinions, keep feedback constantly. It's great when a “corporate spirit” appears in the team. You can create your own attributes, for example, a logo, t-shirts, caps (by the way, we already have this). You can try to organize corporate events, field trips and other things.
When it is pleasant and comfortable for a person to work in a team, then the work seems more interesting to him, he doesn’t have a thought “as soon as 6:00 pm to get out of here”.
Team search for new employees
It would seem that the HR service should be engaged in the search for new employees (they are exactly necessary for this) and the manager (he should also do something). So why should the team itself take part in this? She is already full of work on the project. The answer, in fact, is simple - no one knows better than the team itself what they want from the candidate. It is the team to work with this person in the future. So why not give her the opportunity to make this important choice for her?
Distributed team
It is the 21st century already and it is not at all necessary for each of us to go to the office by 9 am (especially if we are talking about the IT industry). You can work productively and from home. And if a person works from home, so what prevents him from working from home, but in another city or even in another country? That's right - nothing interferes.
The distributed team is good because you have more options to find the right employee for the necessary criteria (skills, experience, salary level). Agree, the choice of candidates throughout Russia will be significantly higher than within the city alone. Also significantly reduced the cost of such employees (office maintenance, equipment).
There is a negative point in such work - people do not see each other. It is very hard to work with a person with whom you are personally unfamiliar. Regular video calls and periodic joint corporate events (at least once a year) can easily solve this problem.
Open salaries and other financial issues of the company
It sounds rather unusual, but believe me, in some companies it works. The approach is that each employee of the company has the opportunity to see how much his colleagues earn (! And even how much his management earns).
This is a rather complicated process and you need to move very gradually to move to open wages. First of all, it is necessary to equalize the salaries of employees, so that there is no situation when Vasya gets 5 rubles for the same job, and Peter - as many as 15. You need to be prepared to be able to answer such questions of your employees as “Why does Peter earn more than me” .
It is worth noting that the disclosure of salaries is only the tip of the iceberg. There are many other financial indicators, which will be useful and interesting to know the staff.
And finally (almost every speaker finished his speech this way): no need to think that a certain approach to the processes within the company and the teams will work 100% for everyone. If this were the case, everyone would have been successful long ago. You need to understand that we are all human and we are all different. Each of us needs an individual approach. Success is just to find this "your" key. If you are uncomfortable working on Scrum, do not force yourself and your team. Take, for example, Kanban. Maybe this is exactly what you need.
Try, experiment, make mistakes and try again, and then everything will work out for you.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/447818/
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