AgileData #14 - Thoughts on the JAFAC conference

Welcome to the Agile BI Podcast, where we chat with guests, or sometimes just to ourselves, about being agile with teams who are delivering data analytics and visualizations. Welcome to the Agile BI Podcast. I'm Shane Gibson.

I'm Blair Tempro.

And today Blair and I are going to have a little chat to ourselves. We attended a conference, Agile conference here in Wellington last week, which is called JAAFAC, and it stands for Just Another Freaking Agile Conference. So it was a pretty awesome conference, kind of run by an agile consulting company here in New Zealand called Nomad8, and they'd run JAFAC 3 times up in Auckland, and this was the first time that they ran it here in Wellington. From memory, there would have been, what do you reckon, Blair, 250 people in the room?

Yeah, yeah, 100 each side plus.

And, you know, from my point of view, was pretty much the who's who of Agile in Wellington, you know, people that I've followed on LinkedIn and Twitter for a long time. So really, really interesting conference. So what we thought we might do is talk a little bit about our views or the nuggets we got from some of the speakers. For a bit of context around it, it was a 2-day conference. They broke the conference up into 2 sections each day. So the morning sessions were presentations from keynote speakers effectively. And then in the afternoon, it moved to an open space framework where there were a number of slots and each of the attendees of the conference could put up something they want to talk about. It was around about, from memory, half an hour for each slot. And then the conference attendees would then move to each one of those conversations, have a chat about the subject that had been put up on the board. So quite a really good way of getting engagement from the entire audience. To enable everybody to have a bit of a chat about something they're passionate about and talk to each other, which is always good. So what we thought we'd do is, yeah, we'll just have a bit of a chat and see what we kind of each got out of some of those presentations. So who are we going to talk about first?

I think we'll talk about Ruth Brown. So Ruth has been working as Head of People at TradeMe. So she went through some of her experiences, especially bringing agile and UX into the people space.

Yeah, so what, what interests me there was Ruth looked like she spent a lot of time doing UX and customer engagement for software development, working in agile teams. And what she talked about was taking those patterns and those ways of working and using them with employees to understand where the employees sit, what's important to them. So yeah, there were some really interesting things in terms of techniques she used to get employee engagement where they could understand what was important for them. You know, one of the examples she used was trying to work through which of the values of their organization were were top of mind or were really important. And she used an example where she provided, you know, in some of the interview sessions, the values and some interactive workshops, and people would rate the values in terms of the ones they thought were important, the ones they thought the organization was executing on. And she talked about how she went into one of the sessions and she kind of forgot to bring the material with her, and so she winged it. And what she realized as part of that is The only real value from Trademe at the time that everybody could remember was, I think it was number 7, don't be a dick. The other ones weren't top of mind, and so as a result, they refined those values down to 4 key values that became memorable. And in kind of testing it later, those stuck. So I thought that was kind of interesting.

And I liked how they turned them into avatars as well and had them around the building.

Yeah, that was cool.

Yeah, I mean, it's in terms of recognition of values, if you've got an avatar or some sort of persona, then it's going to reinforce that. So I thought that was awesome.

Yeah, about that kind of branding and that visibility and that, you know, it's not just posters on the walls, it's something more fun.

Yeah, something that's alive actually.

Yeah. I think the other one that was interesting for me was she started talking about the journey they were going down around bonuses and the way you pay people. And that's particularly interesting to me at the moment because we look at hierarchical organizations, often each of the team members are paid a bonus, you know, based on some kind of corporate performance, but the bonus is tagged to their salary and their performance. And if we're creating these self-organizing teams, how do we actually enable the team's success to be given, to drive the bonus or their compensation structure but while also retaining the equity of people whose roles are more senior and therefore they get remunerated more. So unfortunately she didn't have a great— she hadn't done the work yet, so didn't have the magic answer for me, but that was something that I—

That was your question.

That was my question. I was like, yeah, let me get the answer for this one and freebie. But no, she was still working on that.

Yeah, that's when she goes, Oh, that's a very good question. Oh, okay, maybe in future sessions.

Yeah, maybe we'll look for the next one she presents and see if she solved it for us.

Definitely not guilty for, you know, for thinking about it.

No, no. So I thought that use of UX and customer-facing techniques to work with your people in the organization was pretty cool. Right, which one do we want to talk about next?

Charlotte Walsh from Jade.

Yeah, this was kind of one of my favorite.

Okay, I'll give you hip lots to talk about.

So Charlotte talked about when she was working for an organization, Dynamic Controls, I think, which from memory was an organization that made automated wheelchairs or wheelchairs that were motorized. That's right. And she was at the senior leadership team, and she talked about the journey of moving what was quite a traditional hierarchical organization into this agile way of working and some of the challenges she had there. And then she moved from Dynamic Controls to become the CEO of Jade Software. And again, she talked about the fact that when she made that change, how she could actually start off this agile transformation of Jade and cascade it down through the organization and some of the challenges she had around there. That's right.

It was moving leaders into coaching that I wrote down as a learning from that little chat.

Yeah, and I think also the idea that sometimes people vote themselves off the island. So she talked about— That's right. —at Dynamics, as they went through that cultural change from being managers to leaders, some of the people decided that actually while they could see the value of it, it wasn't something they wanted to do.

Yeah, so it was quite a tidy handshake and sort of transition by the sounds of it.

Yeah, and I find that when I'm working with new teams, you know, if you work with a large enough team, some of that team, some people on that team are going to decide as they go down this journey that actually it's not for them and they need a safe way to stay in the organization and move off to do something that's not so dynamic as the way the teams are working. So I thought that was really interesting. I thought the fact that senior sponsorship seemed to be critical to making business agility and make that change. And that, you know, even with that sponsorship, it's still a long hard road.

Yep, so Charlotte asked the question, has the organization really made a decision to work in another way? So that's what I got out of that.

Yeah, so I think she gave us one example where she kind of came in, you know, worked bottom up even though she was on the leadership team. And then another one where she's gone in and working top down. That was pretty cool. Yeah. Who we got next?

Sandy Davey.

This was my favorite one of the whole thing. So Sandy Davey was talking about the fact that she was the chair of a not-for-profit organization over in Australia called Choice, which is the equivalent of Consumer New Zealand that we have here in New Zealand. And she was talking about being on a board and how an agile change to the way the organization works is perceived by the board and what's important. So I think, you know, you were mentioning just before we started recording that, you know, that whole concept of OKRs was kind of interesting.

Yeah, definitely. And the example that Sandy used was a legacy list of, you know, like a business plan of 42 items, I think it was. And just how hard that is to work with. There's a prioritization issue. So they moved to a concept of OKRs, which in her words made it really hard for managers to hide. You can't hide from an OKR, whereas you can come up with an excuse for not doing a certain item on the business plan. So I thought that was awesome. So OKRs are the way forward. Cool. Sandy.

And I think, yeah, so I think the other one that I picked up that was really interesting was she seemed to have a very good, strong relationship with the CEO of the organization. Totally. So that kind of symbiotic relationship where the board and the CEO are kind of encouraging or embracing this new way of working seemed to be really important. There was another one there that I found interesting as well, is that again, traditional organization, you know, she talked about That's, you know, the feedback is often, that's why we've always done it. And so what they did was they set up an innovation capability that sat slightly outside that organization to try and disrupt what their product or their kind of market was. I've seen that happen before and often see it fail because it ends up being what I call the toy shop effect. You know, the people who are in this new innovative startup move outside the organization, they tend to go to a different building, they have a really cool space, and they become incredibly disconnected. So two behaviors tend to happen. They become the toy shop that actually don't deliver anything, and they never really bring that way of working back in. So I asked a question around that about how did she manage that, and she said, well, while they were still an innovative startup, they were still in the building, in a separate part of it, but still in the building, so they were still connected. The OKRs, and there was a whole lot of focus around actually making sure that when they were experimenting or researching or doing something like that, there was proof points coming back to make sure they were delivering value, not just playing. And that co-location meant that, you know, they could then start bringing some of that new ways of working back into the rest of the organization over time. So I thought that was kind of interesting.

Yeah, and I was also interested in that they had a huge cash reserve and they were, this has got nothing to do with Agile, but they moved from being essentially holding it in the bank for 2% to start looking at innovation and ways to invest that money. From the 60-year-old company organization that it was, it's actually changing their business model.

I think that cash reserve actually was critical. So I think They had a couple of things there I thought was interesting. They had a compelling reason for change. Their business model, which was focused around product reviews and testing, was getting challenged by some new startups. They had a subscription model for a paper magazine that they knew eventually would become a dead product.

She hasn't managed to get rid of it yet.

No, no, it's still incredibly profitable currently. So the organization had to make a change or it wouldn't survive. And that cash reserve, I think, I kind of saw it gave them permission to experiment without having to worry so much, right? If they were having to bootstrap the funding for this, I think their approach may have been different.

I think Sandy talked about a 3-year managed deficit versus short-term profit. So the new versus the old.

Yeah, so that board recognizing that something had to change and— oh, and the other one that I I found really, really interesting was that the board originally was focusing on the what and the how. So they were, man, I think the example she used was somebody went to watch a kid play sport and came back and said, "We need a mobile app for sports injury." So from a board point of view, that's very transactional. She talked about one of the changes to move into more of a business agility model was the board needed to move themselves up to the why.

I think the OKRs did that in a way. So the 42-item business plan is really getting into the whats and the hows. So the OKRs are really the whys. Yeah, I think so.

And I think, didn't we— we're going to get Andy back at some stage to talk us through OKRs a little bit. In more detail, or was that Pete? I can't remember. I do remember somebody talking about OKRs and I was going, oh, that's an area I need to do some research in. Andy or Pete, we'll get them back on. Excellent.

All right, who we got next? Sonya Williams, co-founder of Sharesies.

Yeah, so I mean, for me this was interesting because she, she talked about a startup that she was involved in, Sharesies. One of the interesting things about that was the fact that there were 7 co-founders So that's quite a large group and interesting the way they manage the tension and the roles for those 7 people. I kind of actually thought it was such a cool company that I actually went and signed up.

Oh great, I was thinking that too.

While I was sitting there.

I think they would have got at least 4 converts then from there. Yeah. Because our whole team's going to Sharesies.

Yep, yep, just to, you know, see how it works and see see what I can do with it. So yeah, I thought that was kind of interesting view from a startup and what they did.

Yeah, and the catchphrase that was most caught in my mind was the focus on solving problems, not being perfect. And that's very agile, of course.

Yeah, and also that idea of, you know, experiment early and figure out where you're— in this case, where your market is, but the same thing with agile teams, right? Experiment and figure out what's going to work and change the plan if things aren't working as well as you hoped and just pivot around to something that will work. So yeah, I found that one interesting.

And the minimum lovable product, not MVP, that's one thing that stuck out. It's really cool. The admittance of guerrilla testing, which I think I was part of in a café. Got asked to look around a mobile app sort of wireframe and choose which direction. Oh really?

Yeah, actually they did mention quite a lot of wireframe testing, didn't they, to do it, which I thought was interesting. Yeah, good way of testing that. Something we probably don't do a lot enough in data and analytics in terms of actually testing the wireframes through iterations.

Yeah, well now we're moving more into, well we are, into UX and CX, wireframes will be paramount. Who have we got next? We've got Nigel Dalton, RIA Group Chief and Mentor. The best cool name here.

Yeah, and quite an entertaining— yet again, I've got to say all the speakers were entertaining. Absolutely. Compelling to listen to. So he was the one that talked about the Book of Dave. That's right. And for me, the kind of key theme of his presentation was Agile can often be seen as a religion. There's a set of manuscripts that shall be followed. That's dangerous if that's how people, if that's the only thing people do. So I thought that was quite interesting, a very entertaining way of talking about it based on a book that he read, some dystopian sci-fi story. But the key message being If you pick up the manifesto and the principles and that's the thing, or a methodology, and you mandate that that's the only way to do it, you're not really letting your teams self-organize and find their own ways of working.

That's right. And what can we do to avoid history judging us as naive and foolish?

Transformation jesters. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. I think he was— I'm not sure, was he talking— I don't think he was a great fan of transformation as much as transition, but that could be me imposing my views onto something that he may or may not have said last week.

Yeah. No, highly entertaining. And the book finally got there as far as what it had to do with his journey. Yeah. That was good.

Yeah, that was good. One of the other speakers was Hylia, who we've had on the podcast before, and She was talking about her journey with the sensors for housing. One of the things I found interesting about her one was she made reference to a government organization that is putting sensors into houses. Some of the rights to that data that the tenants should have that the agency believes they shouldn't provide. And so that Although not really in the Agile space, it's kind of close to my heart with some of the stuff I'm doing in the data space right now about if we are collecting information about other people, where is that line in the sand between black, white, and gray about what that data can and can't be used for. So I thought that was kind of interesting.

Yeah, and it's that whole elephant in the room about data sovereignty.

And yeah, yep, big things for us here in New Zealand. So, you know, the Tonga, you know, the ownership of that data. And but what also is right, and interesting, I was just reading a blog post today with this idea of data trust or a trust network. And, you know, whether In the article there was a reference to a government organization here in Wellington that is grabbing data from commercial organizations, putting it together with data they have, and then making that commercially available to people for use. And so that was seen as a first step in this idea of a data trust network. And for me, I'm not sure I'm so comfortable that the government agencies are the ones putting data together and then selling it. I'm not sure that's my definition of data trust, but I think that's probably going to be a bit like the Book of Dave, right? There's going to be some semi-religious arguments around use of data and what is good and what's black, what's white, and what's grey.

And Hattie had a very strong— has strong thoughts on that, which is great. What we must pay to use the service. Yep. How it's been collected. Yeah, a big topic.

Yeah, and I think, you know, one of the things that came out really, really strongly from the whole 2 days was that passion. You know, passion of the people there, passion in Agile. In one of the open spaces conversations I went to, there was a very robust discussion around certification of Agile coaches. You know, should Agile coaches be— go through a certification basis, and that then went into a whole conversation around was that certification around competency or not. So, you know, is it filling out an exam, right? Or actually, is it proving that you're competent by coming back and referencing the customers you've worked with and the experiences and what you've learned? And that one, again, it was quite a robust discussion.

Yeah, I probably should have gone to that one rather than how can I make part-time agile work in an organization. Oh, was there an answer? With difficulty. I think I passed you in the hallway and told you where I was going, and you're like, "Oh yeah, good luck," as you went to find out about Agile coaching. Yeah, yeah.

Should have followed you, mate. I know, that idea of part-time, and that was hard. I mean, that was part of the cool thing about that OpenSpace was there were so many good sessions you want to go to, but you can only go to one. I mean, one I went to was a support group, so where we could talk about some of the not-so-good successes and what we did. When we've been working with teams. So again, that idea that actually as an Agile coach, when you're working with a customer on your own, there is a network of other people that are willing, have the same background and experiences or similar, and willing to talk and share and listen and support. I thought that was pretty cool.

Yeah, so one of the ones I went to was, there was someone, I think it might have been Nigel that used the plate smashing out of the cupboard. So it's whether you board up that cupboard and stop those plates from smashing and then put a nice curtain over the front of them and pretend they're not there, or do you actually— are you the person that will just let those plates smash and then clean up the debris afterwards? Yep. So we had that as a topic and it was really interesting about, you know, as an Agile Coach or as a Scrum Master, is it your role to pick out things in the organization that are screwed up and fix them? So really robust discussion about that.

Is there any tips for, you know, top 3 tips on how to solve it?

I think we came to the conclusion that we'll do our best, but you can't be responsible for shit that's outside of your scope. But yeah, it was quite a nice visual of those plates just ready to go smash.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's right. And then do you fix it or do you not? So I think for me, you know, one of the things right at the end was the key takeaways. And I think for me, there's probably two that resonate strongly, and they are, you know, in Wellington and Auckland, some people have traveled I think actually— In Christchurch? Yeah, I actually met some people from Australia. Oh, really? Kind of cool, yeah, flew all the way over. But, you know, as an Agile community, we have some really strong, passionate, and experienced people that are passionate about helping teams and making them deliver in better ways with more fun. I think that's the first one. And the second one is a recurring theme that while working with teams from a bottom-up approach helps the team be more successful. When you get that C-level, when you get that person at the top that's bringing the business agility with them and driving that transition of the organization from the current way of working to new way of working, you know, it's like a magic unicorn. When that happens, it's a thing of beauty.

Yeah, me too, in regards to that one. I had some really interesting chats over a couple of beers at the end of day 1, and that was the theme that a certain group of us were talking about, and that was what works best, is it bottom-up or top-down? We've tried bottom-up, a few other places have. I've never been in a bottom-down type scenario, but I've heard that it's the best way to do it. Yeah.

Yeah, that's cool. And then I think just to close out on Twitter, one of the things that they did, which was kind of cool, was you had these little posts, well, little notes where you could write down your aha moment and post it up for everybody else. Some of the really cool ones is there is, you know, be trustworthy with our data. That's Hilyah talking about, you know, New Zealand can be to trust as Switzerland is for neutrality. So that thing came through quite strongly, I thought. Another one there was, you know, the only thing more difficult than starting something new in an organization is stopping something old. I like that. I like that. You know, sometimes it's just because it's always been done that way is one of the hardest things to change. One there from a personal point of view was, you know, the aha moment they wrote up was my difference is my strength, my superpower. So, you know, we often try and downplay why we're different or how we're different, but using it in a in a safe way is good. Another one is, we do it because we want to do so much good. The fact that the people in the room really were there to help was kind of cool. The Agile Manifesto is not a religion, obviously came out of the book of Dave. Yeah. Which I think is really important. And another one was, the world doesn't need more of the same. True. We have to— change is a good thing. So I thought, because it was called Just Another Frickin'— and it wasn't the word frickin'— Agile Conference. We're amongst friends. The language in it was pretty cool. Kind of closing one out, which came from Sandy Davey, and so I wrote down as the aha moment was, you know, what does Choice Magazine or Choice do over in Australia? Well, really, they keep the bastards honest. I thought that was, you know, in terms of— That was gold. Mission or a vision statement that was pretty clear, so I thought that was pretty cool.

Yeah, and another theme that seemed to resonate from the two days was that, you know, the responsibility of saving the planet, and that was a big one with Brahman. So she spoke about her organization and and you know, just the consciousness that they've got about being green. So yep, be agile and be green. Yeah, yeah.

So you know, I think in summary for me, it was good 2 days. I like the format, like the format of some presentations in the morning to get you thinking and then the open spaces in the afternoon to be able to work with people and talk to them that you haven't I thought 2 days was a good length. I think 1 day would have been a bit short, but 2 days was a good—

Overall, I enjoyed it, so can't wait to go back next year.

Yeah, and then one of the other things that was talked about in one of the open spaces was some of the attendees talking about setting up a large-scale Agile conference here in New Zealand. Sometime next year, looking to run a conference of, I think they were saying, somewhere between 500 and 1,000 people. So, you know, actually bringing that together. So let's hope that gets kicked off and people can put in the hard yards for that. And that would be quite awesome. Yeah, totally. Excellent. All right. Well, I think that's us for this time. So we'll catch you all later.

Cheers. See you.