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From an Agile organization to a
continuously improving
organization
Dr. Ronen Bar-Nahor
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Inspiration
• http://yuvalyeret.com/2012/05/16/so-what-is-lean-startup-for-change-ls4chg/
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mrother/Homepage.html
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Open System Theory
• Entropy • Homeostasis• Equifinality• ...
• …
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Agile Change – Consider The J-Curve
Perform
ance
Time
Continuous Improvement
4
coaching Management attention
What is the level of stickiness of our current practices ? Did we reach the “no return point” ? Do we allocate internal energy for the survival
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outcomeeffectiveness “the way we
operate”
the way we
operateOutcome
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Manager Role –> Becomes Process Engineer
• Receive special training in process improvement and problem solving techniques
• First line of defense when abnormal conditions arise• Serves to orchestrate problem solving.
– Support, teach, coach the working team in its ongoing efforts to improve the process through experiments and double loop thinking
http://effective.leadershipdevelopment.edu.au/double-loop-learning-leadership-development/leadership-development/
http://www.examiner.com/article/top-10-toyota-misconceptions
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Agility Stickiness
The managers becomes the coaches that lead the organization to continuous improvement
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Typical way of Process improvement
• We hunt for wastes or react to problems
• We define solutions that we believe will work (and we think we know how we will get there)
• We try to make the best plan, and then implement it across organization
• It takes times until we see results
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The old way
• We have many process improvement opportunities– Retrospectives– Escaping defects analysis– Problems etc.
Current Condition
How we decide where to shoot ?
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The new way – Inspect and Adapt
• Reality is complicated. We donʼt know whatʼs going to happen.
• We move in small cycles of learning, changing direction and solution as we learn more
• Learning and experimenting become an organizational habit
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mrother/Homepage.html
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The new way
• Focus on your target condition• Than Inspect and Adapt your way through
experimenting Minimal Viable Changes (MVC)
Current Condition
Target Condition
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How do we “Inspect and Adapt” our way ?
• MVC consist from small cycles of scientific experiments/learning (PDCA)
Plan
Do
Check
Act
• Hypostasis you want to validate
• How are you going to validate it
• Experiment
• Results vs. hypothesis
• Continue ?• Change
experiment ?• Change the target
condition ?• Scale MVC ?
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Example
• Target Condition –> Improve code quality
• MVC -> Implement pair programming in one team
• Experiment -> through PDCA cycle
Plan
Do
Check
Act
• Hypostasis - Pair Programming will improve :code readability , simplicity, and quality while not affecting overall estimate
• A/B testing, measure – actual, # defects and code review
• Train• Experiment –
• Sprint or two user stories
• Results vs. hypothesis
• Retrospect • Do one more cycle
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To summarize
Vision for the customers -
Vague
Vision
Concrete goal (1-3 years)
Challenge
Beyond knowledge threshold(1w-3m)
Target ConditionCurrent
Condition
Problems, Wastes,
Retrospective issues,Ideas
MVC s through rapid experiments;
Track daily.
TC
TC
TC
adjust your next step accordingly toward the goal.
1. Understand Direction
2. Grasp Current Condition
3. Define next Target Condition
4. Experiment
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Improvement Kata – a pattern that becomes a habit
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Moving from theory to practiceImprovement Backlog vs. Release Backlog
Challenge(Release Goals)
Target Condition(Feature)
MVC(Epic-MMF)
Experiment/ PDCA
(User Story)
Tasks
Experiment
MVC
TC
As a < > I want to <the experiment> so that <what I expect to learn/achieve<
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Kanban – managing the change flow
Backlog Plan Deploy
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Experiment
Validate
5 3 2 3
FLOW Avg lead time: days 12
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• Visualize the CI workflow• Limit WIP (do not do too many changes at once. ”stop
starting start finishing”)
• Measure & optimize flow (e.g. No. experiments, cycle time of a change)
• Explicit policies (Definition of Done, WIP limits, etc)
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Improvement Board
Backlog Prep.
Plan Experiment Validate Deploy/Scale
Define next Target Condition &First set of MVCs
Define The experiments
Do the experiment, Track daily -5Q
Discuss results
Decide next act
Expand implementation/Change MVC /…
Limit the WIP of change
To do WIP Done
MVC or Experiment
Tasks
Or a Task Board (Scrum type) Ceremonies:• Stand-up meeting• Improvement Demo• Retrospective
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Benefits
• A way of actualizing PDCA and continuous improvement in an organization.
• Makes people more capable of improving processes and meeting challenges.
• Generates better teamwork and ownership.
• A way of dealing with uncertainty.
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Thanks