Retrospective of Agile in Canberra - Agile Canberra February Meetup Synopsis
Updated: Feb 25, 2018
Recently we had the February meetup for Agile Canberra.
The meetup was a great opportunity to sit and share recent experiences in IT, government, work life and Agile leadership in Canberra. We hope to see more of you at the next meetup and to get to the formal exercises. All members are invited to get involved in the community and provide feedback and suggestions for content and format of future meetups.
During the meetup we asked attendees the following questions to facilitate the retrospective and get conversations flowing.
What worked well and what is working well?
What hasn't worked well and could be improved?
These are the responses...
What worked well and what is working well?
That agile has been influencing change and allowing people to ask questions. For example why are we doing this in this way. Do we have to keep doing it this way. Agile has opened up communication channels that support continuous improvement.
Agile teams within the public sector are starting to embrace failure. This change in culture allows for more experimentation and innovation versus traditional approaches and the sunk cost fallacy of rigid project structures. Identifying and learning from failure early, prevents chasing good money after bad.
What hasn't worked well and could be improved?
Teams are learning important lessons at training, but there is a lack of organisational support afterwards to embed the concepts. Organisations are not supporting the larger culture/transformation change that must happen to achieve true agility. One way to improve this is with subsequent learning from facilitated workshopping sessions, where current issues and concepts relevant to trainees are explored. Participants can then go straight back to their teams and apply what is learnt to their daily work. This does require a more targeted approach to training within organisations.
Agile & an agile mindset is lacking at management level. There are not enough agile leaders versus traditional managers. Leaders must be willing to experiment and engage with risk and support the experimentation throughout. These next steps towards adopting Agile are required to allow Agile to scale successfully within an organisation.
Further Notes:
Book - I highly recommend Joy Inc. - By Richard Sheridan. It is a great book on organisation culture and how a successful software company makes it happen.
Upcoming Conferences - Agile Australia is happening 18th-19th of June in Melbourne.
Upcoming Training - Agile Fundamentals courses are coming up for Canberra in March and May. Check out SoftEd for more details.
MeetUp Supported By:
SKNG Services, SoftEd and IBM.