This is the seventh in a series of posts going into more detail around my thoughts on remaining an effective practitioner in scaled Agile – Visualise the Work & Challenges.
To get a wider context of this post, please refer to the original “Surviving Scaled Agile” post outlining the model.
Two of the standout principles for me involve transparency & trust. I believe you can’t have one without the other.
Strive to visualise meaningful metrics (transparency) around the progress of your development will help build trust.
Having your progress displayed for all to see takes courage, especially if you are in a toxic or blaming culture.
If your progress isn’t going as well as hoped for, you need to have a story for potential reasons why you’re off track & what you plan to do about it. Executing on this correction plan will demonstrate your abilities & over time will build trust.
“We aim to make mistakes faster than everyone else.”
Daniel Ek
Celebrating failure facilitates learning from that failure. Punishing failures causes it to be hidden & potentially happen again…
Having your progress visual also helps you build convincing arguments when you need to educate your HiPPO, (see later).
Rather than using subjective, qualitative arguments which are more susceptible to misinterpretation, having data readily available not only enables you to have answers ready to quick fire questions in troublesome meetings, but also put together a constructive, objective argument based on quantitative information (remember quantifying your programme vision?)
What next?
- Create a lightweight, low tech dashboard on a whiteboard to show your progress
- Continuously track & nurture key metrics closely - updating retrospectively is hard & demotivating
- Extract data from tools & stick on your whiteboard
- A picture says a 1000 words…
- Keep your whiteboard updated - at least daily!