A peek into an Agile infected Culture
Add to calendarWhat happens when your organization practices Agile software development for many years? Well, you get pretty good at Agile: you are able to apply Agile with reducing effort on challenging projects. But there is another interesting side-effect which is that your people internalize Agile values, so much so that Agile becomes second-nature to everyone!
In this photo tour, come see how a culture is infected with Agile thinking, you will see how we apply Agile to many activities like training- sessions, recruitment, staffing, office reforms, strategic decisions and more.
2 min: A brief introduction of our organization
3 min: History and current state of Agile adoption in the organization
25 mins: A guided photo tour showing the application of Agile values in the organization
Some examples among others that we’ll talk about, depicting the application of the following XP values (~5 min for each)
Communication
* An office layout that encourages communication across team boundaries
* Visibility provided by the staffing team with the help of large visible charts
* A Card Wall, kept in the open, updated by the recruitment team to track status of candidates & referrals
* People pairing while conducting interviews, trainings, presentations, or even sending out important emails
Feedback
* Internal trainers using daily retrospective exercises to fine-tune their sessions every day
* Collecting informal feedback from participants of our developer community events
* Following the principles of continuous feedback and improvement at a personal level (not being constrained by performance appraisal cycles)
Courage
* Folks at varying levels of experience often being able to influence decision making by asking the right questions
Simplicity
* How a very lo-fi idea solved our problem of people missing weekly timesheets
Respect
* Every individual being allowed to choose their official mentor themselves instead of being assigned a supervisor
* Innovative methods used by the organization’s leaders to incorporate inputs from all employees in order to take strategic decisions
* How we are trying to collectively own office improvement activities by signing up for tasks/ideas and tracking progress on a “Yes, we can” wall
5 mins: The results (covering both the positive and negative)
10 mins: Q&A on benefits and possible drawbacks of such an Agile culture, how did we build it, and strengthened it.
- Insight into a long-time-agile organization’s culture via the actions of its people in non-software contexts
- How Agile eventually permeates individuals’ way of thinking and behaving
- Some simple practices that you can try to use in your own organization
- Making agile a fun part of your organization’s way of thinking
- How to create a leadership centered on people over processes
