What is the most interesting outcome you have achieved as an agile consultant?
Insights from an Agile Consultant
I can honestly say that this is a really interesting question, as ‘interesting’ can be interrupted in many ways. How you look at it, for instance, there can be a ‘good’ interesting and a ’not’ so good ‘interesting’.
Either way, I can say that as an Agile consultant, I’ve been fortunate to have witnessed various interesting outcomes. Needless to say, some were quite rewarding and interesting, and others less so.
However, both types of experiences offer great insights and rich learning opportunities that, over the years, have undoubtedly helped me guide my clients better. 💼
The Status Quo
I will start with a not-so-good outcome that I have experienced as an Agile consultant, and it’s a particularly thought-provoking example, too, as it involved a well-established company in the United States, a company so traditional that the office cubicles still sported oak panelling!
Remember, never to mistake an organisation’s old-school aesthetics for complacency. With substantial cash flow, this particular company saw no immediate need for change. After all, change implies risk, and why risk disrupting a profitable status quo? 💰
However, using my knowledge of development and progress, I managed to rally their IT leadership and management around Agile and DevOps principles. On the whole, the team was excited about transitioning towards continuous delivery, enhancing feedback loops, and using data-driven insights for decision-making.
Unfortunately, about a year later, I learned the organisation had chosen to revert to their old practices. As a result, these advocates for change, the same people eager for Agile transformation, had left or been let go. While it was a disappointing turn of events, I like to believe that these individuals moved on to organisations more receptive to innovation. 🔄
An Agile Success Story
I’m happy to say that in contrast to the previous example of an interesting outcome, let’s talk about a resounding success story that unfolded in Utah, in the US, in a company called Backcountry. Although Backcountry is a clothing manufacturer, what set them apart was their impressive tech team. Nearly half of their staff were software engineers responsible for building their procurement software.
This company’s operation impressed me as their in-house team managed everything, from manufacturing to logistics and even point of sale. This was a company ripe for the implementation of Agile practices, and we seized the opportunity. 📈
Holistic Approach to Agile Training
I was eager to get started at Blackcountry, and so we began with Scrum training. Within no time, we then extended it to almost everyone in the company.
It was great to see attendees, from the CEO to the forklift operator in the warehouse. Everyone was involved. This extensive involvement allowed everyone to see the impact of their feedback on the final product, creating a sense of ownership and cohesion within the company.
For me, it was the forklift operator’s interest which was followed by the eagerness to learn Agile was particularly memorable. Initially sceptical about the training’s relevance to his role, by the end of the first day, he became one of the most engaged participants.
It wasn’t long before the forklift driver realised his unique position to influence how the software worked for him and the organisation at large.
Encouraged by this transformation, I knew this was a testament to the power of Agile when it’s embraced holistically by a company and its employees. 🙌
In this case, the impact of this Agile transformation was phenomenal. Even 12 years later, I receive messages from the Blackcountry describing their Agile training as a “game changer.” But I can’t take ownership of that change. It was their commitment and their embracement of the Agile training that sparked the transformation.
These two examples show that when everyone from the CEO to the warehouse operator commits to Agile, it creates a ripple effect throughout the organisation. It shows the level of dedication and the importance they assign to the Agile journey.
This was undoubtedly one of the most fulfilling experiences of my career as an Agile consultant, which continues to inspire me. Participants from this training have since spread the Agile spirit in companies like Coca-Cola and Healthgrades, perpetuating the ripple effect. 🎆
Welcome the Agile Journey
As these two very different stories above show, Agile can either transform your company or, when resisted, leave your organisation stagnant.
So, are you ready to start your Agile journey?
Let’s build the future of work together! 🚀
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Um, that’s a really good question. What’s the most interesting outcome? Because it can be interesting good and it can be interesting bad, right? I have had the experience.
Um, we’ll start with the interesting part, right? Or it depends how you look at it. It depends how you look at it. It could also be interesting goods, right?
Um, but I had this experience with a company in the United States that was a very old-school type of company. Put it this way, the cubes. If you’re not familiar with the way things work in the US, you often have these cubicles with partitions, temporary partitions around each desk where you’ve got a finite amount of space and that’s yours. And they’re quite high, so you don’t hear other people. But there’s big, big cubicle thing and the cubicles had oak paneling. That’s how old school this organization was and how much money was going around.
One of the problems with organizations with huge amounts of cash flow and huge amounts of cash to throw around is that they’re not that interested in change, right? Because change is risk. And if we have a huge cash cow that we’re milking, then why should we change and potentially risk that cash cow?
Um, which is why Ken Kench Weber talks about the time to go into an organization and affect change is when they’ve most egregiously failed to deliver something, right? That’s when people are most open to change.
But, uh, in this organization, um, I did a whole bunch of sessions. It was kind of DevOps and Agile. It was all homegrown. It wasn’t, it was probably prior to doing a lot of stuff with a lot more stuff with Scrum.org.
Um, but I managed to convince the 30 people in IT leadership and management that, um, this Agile and DevOps thing is a great idea. We need to move towards continuous delivery. We need to move towards inspecting and adapting, causing the feedback loops, gathering data, figuring out what’s going on. So this, this, it was totally sold on this idea.
Um, and then I heard about the, like, eight months later, maybe a year later, um, I heard about that engagement and they were all gone from that organization. They’d all been, they’d all effectively been fired because the organization had decided not to go that way anymore. So as an organization, we’re not going to do Agile, we’re not going to do continuous delivery, we’re going to do the same thing we’ve always done.
And they kicked up a fuss, right? Because they’re like, “Well, no, that’s not good. We’re going to have these problems. We’re going to have huge amounts of technical debt. We’re going to have potential failures going down the line.” And they were enough of a problem that they were gotten rid of, right? So that’s kind of negative.
But I don’t know if you think about it, it’s probably those folks went on to better jobs, to more advantageous organizations that are trying to do things a little bit differently. And perhaps they had a better outcome for most of those folks. So that was a big negative one.
Um, that’s probably the most negative one that I’ve seen and that was an unusual circumstance, right? You don’t see that sort of thing happening that often.
Um, but the other one, uh, the most positive one, uh, was training for one of my favourite organisations at the time, which is actually in Utah, which is a crazy place. But it was in Utah and, um, it was for a company called Backcountry.
And Backcountry were a clothing manufacturer, clothing, uh, ski. It was where, um, you know, where the Olympics were held at one time in Utah. And, you know, basically from their office, you can see the ski jump and all the things that are around that.
And they trained, um, everybody in their company. So there was a really interesting organization because there were less than 100 people in the whole company and 48 of them were software engineers.
So this is a clothing company. Why do they have 48 of their company being nearly 50 of the company being software engineers? Um, and it was that they built and ran their own procurement software.
So their software that they use to get the stuff to organise the factories in China that were making the apparel, get all the apparel across into the US and get it distributed in the US, their different warehouses. And then you get to get it sent out to individuals because they ran their own points of sale as well. They had five or six different storefronts that were all their brands. And they also had not only their clothes but other competitors’ clothes on their own website as well.
That was all their own kit, right? They built all the software. The guy driving around the warehouse with an iPad attached to his forklift telling him which pallets to go get and pick up and what trucks to put them on, they wrote the whole thing, right?
Um, so that’s why they needed so many software engineers. But it was hugely effective for them.
Um, so what we did was we did Scrum training. We did the applying professional Scrum. It was called Professional Scrum Foundations back in the day. It was actually my first ever, uh, uh, classes of that type that I ran.
Um, and there were very big classes. There was like 45 people per class, which is pretty big. I normally max out at 25 now.
And they trained everybody in the company. The CEO was in one of the classes. The CEO’s secretary assistant was in one of the classes. The guy who drives the forklift in the warehouse was in one of the classes.
And even things like the guy who drives the forklift in the warehouse, after the first half day, went to his management and said, “Uh, what the heck am I doing here?” Obviously, he drives a forklift in the warehouse, so I’m using the polite version of the way he would say it, right? What the heck am I doing here? This is of no value whatsoever.
Um, can I just go back to doing my work?
And, um, you know, his managers like, “Oh, just stick it out for today and if you still have the same story at the end of today, then you can, you don’t have to go tomorrow,” right?
But by the end of the first day, he was the one, uh, kind of standing up, uh, pointing at the board with the team, talking about the different, uh, uh, uh, items on the backlog and how they could add more value.
Because he had an epiphany. He had this realisation of the connection between the feedback he can give and the product that’s then created.
So he realised that he was uniquely positioned to provide major influence to the way the software worked for him to better support the success of the organization. And it was this, “I need to be involved in this. I need to be a part of this story.”
And that was just a fantastic thing to see and hear. A little bit more to the story than that, but I still get emails from people in that organization. And that’s what, that would be 12 years later. I still get emails from people in the organization saying it was a complete game changer for the organization, that experience.
And I can’t take ownership of that, right? They took ownership of that. It was, can you imagine?
Everybody in the organization goes through this training. This training is so important that the CEO says, “I’m going to spend two full days sitting in a room with all of these people and demonstrate, even if they know all the stuff already, I’m going to sit here and demonstrate to everybody in the room how important this is, how important it is to our strategy going forward.”
That for me is leadership, right?
Um, and that just, that was the most amazing, um, class I’ve ever been a part of. And then going forward into the future, uh, their CIO has called me in to do additional training with them at Healthgrades, which you can see some videos on my YouTube from the folks at Healthgrades.
Um, I’ve, uh, uh, people have gone off to work at Coca-Cola, which I’ve done training for.
Um, yeah, it’s been, that was a great experience for me, for them, and for their organization.
Thanks for watching the video. If you enjoyed it, please like, follow, and subscribe. I always reply to comments. And if you want to have a chat about this or anything else Agile, Scrum, or DevOps, then please book a coffee with me through Naked Agility.
