Agile

LESSON
LESSON SCRIPT

@Circus_St | www.circusstreet.com 2
AGILE LESSON SCRIPT
LESSON 2

Chapter 1: Introduction
Hello and welcome back. We’ve already covered the basics of agile and why it’s
so widely used by the digital industry to drive innovation. Now you understand the
fundamentals, we’re going to explore how agile can be applied at a company level
to benefit teams, individuals and, most importantly, how it can deliver real value to
the customer.

Before we dive in, let’s take a minute to go through what we’ll be covering in this
lesson.

© Circus Street Ltd. 2

AGILE LESSON SCRIPT
LESSON 2

Chapter 2: Agile Principles & Application

Any team that applies agile principles can be considered agile. The core values
come from the four pillars we discussed in the last lesson. Do you remember them?

That’s right, it’s about empowering teams to get the job done, getting products into
the hands of customers quickly, working with the customer to understand their
needs and the ability to respond to change.

Now you understand the four pillars that are essential to agile, we need to focus on
the principles that your business will need to get to grips with to fully embrace agile
working across the entire organisation, which means different teams across the
business working together towards a common goal.

1. The principle that needs to sit at the heart of your business is the quick,
continuous delivery of value-adding increments to your product or service.
That means letting go of deadlines - but, in exchange, the business should
see faster, more effective innovation.

Applying this principle is often a great first step, but there are still eleven more
you can use to help you as you progress along the path to becoming truly
agile.

2. The second principle is: welcome change, even late in the process -
especially where it gives the customer a competitive advantage.

3. Deliver working products as frequently as possible - aim for shorter

timescales as much as you can!

4. Keep business people and members of the agile team working together
daily.

5. Build products with teams of motivated individuals. Give them the right tools,
environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

6. Encourage face-to-face communication within and between teams.

7. Use the presence (or absence!) of working products as a measure of success.

8. Maintain a consistent, realistic pace of work.

© Circus Street Ltd. 3

AGILE LESSON SCRIPT
LESSON 2

9. Always make sure you’re actively striving to maintain excellence in product

design and production.

10. Recognise that simplicity, and the art of maximising the amount of work not
done, is essential.

11. Be self-organising. Self-organising teams produce the best architecture,

design and product requirements.

12. And finally, the twelfth principle: Make time at regular intervals to reflect on
how you could become more efficient, and use those insights to tweak the
team’s activities accordingly.

Once a business has embraced the 12 principles, the next step is to apply them
across the entire organisation. The major challenge of applying agile in this way is
getting different departments and different disciplines to work together but the major
benefit will be breaking down the silos to work towards common business goals.
Let’s not be flippant about this - it is really difficult for many organisations to break
down the barriers but the rewards can be great.

According to Deloitte, those businesses with the common goal of being centred
around the customer earn 60% more than their siloed counterparts.

A business delivering a product or a service is made up of multiple disciplines, all

with different skill sets contributing to different aspects of the product, but ultimately
aiming towards the same product-focused goal. Bringing many agile teams together
to contribute to a single delivery often requires team members to work in horizontal
slices across the company - it could be that you have a representative from all the
departments - from data analysis, sales, design, through to marketing.

Department store Nordstrom demonstrated how applying agile across departments

and moving away from siloing teams according to discipline revolutionised its
product.

Before, the retailer was working on a complex Waterfall project, with separate teams
all contributing to a single delivery of a predefined scope that reflected the needs of
the business at the time it was written. The teams were run separately and worked
from different requirements according to their discipline. Two and a half years later,
the project ended in a big bang release of everything in that predefined scope,
resulting in something outdated and irrelevant that no longer served customers’

© Circus Street Ltd. 4

AGILE LESSON SCRIPT
LESSON 2

needs. The store identified an urgent need to apply agile across its online business
to address this failure.

Starting with the customer mobile app, Nordstrom committed to delivering frequent
incremental chunks and to getting rid of the divide between skill sets in the
development and product teams. Instead, the business built cross-functional, cross-
disciplined teams centred around value. The teams started continually planning their
work for small, incremental deliveries, based on a single source of truth for business
requirements.

As a result there were fewer bugs, productivity went up, and the mobile releases
went from twice per year to monthly, demonstrating that applying agile processes to
the business as a whole can increase output, speed of delivery, and quality.

Nordstrom proves that a value-centred, iterative approach to delivery works well,

and has rolled the same structure out across the business to extend the customer-
driven methodology for all of its online products. It is this cross-functional, value-
centric approach that allows businesses to achieve customer value.

© Circus Street Ltd. 5

AGILE LESSON SCRIPT
LESSON 2

Chapter 3: Agile Across the Organisation

It should come as no surprise that to smoothly transition to an agile model, it’s
important to take an agile approach to it.

Think about small changes that slowly apply well-explored and well-explained agile
methods. Gently introduce the team or teams, as well as business owners, to the
benefits of agile without unsettling those who will be instrumental in its success or
failure.

A simple step to introduce multiple teams to the concept of agile is to facilitate

something called a “Scrum of Scrums”, also known as a “meta-Scrum”. It uses the
very basics of the daily stand up - sometimes referred to as the “daily scrum” - to
align different teams to a common business goal and unblock any
interdependencies between them.

Each team should send an ambassador to the Scrum of Scrums meeting to represent
them, and each participant shares the team’s progress, plans, and blockers, if they
have any. In particular, the Scrum of Scrums helps to remove cross-departmental
barriers, improving collaboration between teams and making for better coordinated
deliveries.

You might want to get each Scrum of Scrums participant to write a few notes on
behalf of their team, collect them all together and then send them out to everyone in
the company - giving everyone a regular insight into what’s going on in all areas of
the business.

As we’ve explored, a vital component for scaling agile across a company is having a
clear customer-led and business-focused goal which all teams work towards.

Therefore, a primary rule for a business wishing to scale agile across the company
should be a singular product backlog - which is basically a list of things that need to
be done. This is owned and maintained by one Product Owner who represents the
customer.
As different teams specialise in different areas, it’s easy to fall into maintaining
separate backlogs according to the practical needs of the different disciplines - for
example - having a technology-focused backlog for a development team, or a
marketing materials focused backlog for a sales team.

However, all teams should be led by a common voice, which is the customer’s, to
understand how to deliver value for them. Of course, in practise, this is challenging,

© Circus Street Ltd. 6

AGILE LESSON SCRIPT
LESSON 2

as there are often many stakeholders in different departments who value different
aspects of the product, but introducing multiple product owners dilutes the notion of
building for the customer.

It’s not uncommon for large-scale organisations, with many teams focusing on
different areas of the product, to struggle with spreading one PO thinly across a
complex product, and they start to suffer from lack of direction. To get around this
challenge, some organisations have a team of POs, each of whom oversees a subset
of the product backlog, and an overarching Executive PO, who manages the overall
product strategy and ensures there is clear direction for delivery.

Another really important part of applying agile across an organisation is allowing

teams to fail together and learn from mistakes.

Take eCommerce giant Etsy as an example. It was using a Waterfall-style model of

working, and it struggled with a lot of issues with the product, including site
downtimes and delivery problems. Not only did this frustrate its customers, but it
never seemed to improve.

When the company transitioned to an agile model, it made use of “post mortem”
meetings - a session where the team gets together to review what went wrong and
to put tangible actions in place to prevent it from happening again. Not only was this
an improvement on the old methods, but these meetings have become such a
significant cultural event for the company that everyone’s invited, even unaffected
departments such as Finance. Post-mortems are a learning opportunity and Etsy
believes this culture of improvement is one to be shared to provide benefits for
everyone.

© Circus Street Ltd. 7

AGILE LESSON SCRIPT
LESSON 2

Chapter 4: The Ups & Downs of Agile

For many business owners, agile working is pretty radical. In order to get your
business on board, you need to sell in the benefits, as well as understanding the
challenges you may face. There are some compelling reasons you can give, some of
which we’ve already covered.

Many businesses consider themselves to be customer-centric, and becoming Agile

is the ultimate way of demonstrating that you really are. Of course agility also
enables the business to be opportunistic and react to changes from customers and
competitors.

A key argument for adopting agile across the business is the potential cost savings.
This argument not only applies to product development itself - which we’ve already
discovered is about eliminating waste - but to staff costs too. A flatter structure leads
to a reduction in management overheads. Presenting these reasons to senior
management should at least get them thinking about changing the way in which
different parts of the business work together.

There are challenges for businesses to face in the agile sphere. Often, these come
from the shift in management style and the increase in delegation to different areas
of the business that agile brings about.

Typical organisational structures tend to foster top-down management styles.

There’s usually a project manager who’s responsible for delivery, and whose job it is
to dictate tasks to the team and report upwards to a hierarchy of management
stakeholders or back to a client.

An agile team, on the other hand, is wholly self-organising. They share responsibility
for making decisions about the product and how it’s built, and mandating when
deliveries will happen and what they will contain. The team is also empowered to
liaise directly with the customer in order to understand their needs better, and own
the solution they come up with. This shift in responsibility can be unsettling for
business owners wanting to maintain a sense of control and organisation, but it’s
vital to harness innovation and productivity from skilled and motivated workers.

Agile also brings a sense of uncertainty which some business owners may struggle
to adapt to. Smaller delivery commitments leave more room for uncertainty around
the future of the product, with roadmaps that may be vague and subject to change.
However, accepting these uncertainties is part and parcel of being in a position to
respond to changes in the market and customer feedback on previous iterations.

© Circus Street Ltd. 8

AGILE LESSON SCRIPT
LESSON 2

The digital industry is fast-paced and environments are constantly changing, and,
whilst agile relishes those changes and adapts to them, the potential for unknowns
can make it difficult to forecast business commitments and plan for the future.

A difficult concept within agile for many businesses to understand is that of a flat
management hierarchy. The delegation to the workers means that the team, as a
unit, make decisions and are responsible for those decisions and delivering on them.
This eliminates the need for a hierarchy of managers who are responsible for their
employees’ actions, and suggests that the arguably wasteful bureaucracy of
management is not needed in the process, promoting only work that offers direct
value, and therefore reducing costs.

However, this delegation in responsibility is not necessarily a delegation of

authority; plenty of agile businesses maintain typical roles, especially around
stakeholder status
and senior management. The principle of business people and members of the agile
team working together daily allows this to work for all levels of the business, and
solutions should not be dictated from the top down, but rather worked through and
constantly reviewed together. It is vital for businesses to instill trust in agile teams
to get solutions delivered and build quality in the product.

Many agile rules, and the tools for implementing them, exist for the benefit of the
team, however the agile manifesto recognises that the business and the team are
striving for the same goal, and therefore, those rules and tools are available for
anyone involved in any capacity.

An example is the sprint burndown for a Scrum team. As the sprint progresses, the
team monitors its progress daily by logging each task’s effort remaining and plotting
this against an ideal trend. While this is a useful tool for the team to ensure they’re
keeping their commitments, it can also be observed by any member of the business
to understand expectations for delivery. This means that they can better understand
the team’s progress and generate discussions.

An agile team also welcomes members of the business external to them to their daily
stand ups, where they can get a status update if desired. Although participation is
limited to the members of the team, daily recaps on achievements and plans are a
useful way for stakeholders to understand the team’s processes and keep abreast of
progress.

© Circus Street Ltd. 9

AGILE LESSON SCRIPT
LESSON 2

Chapter 5: Building an Agile Culture

Taking guidance from principles is only a starting point, especially where an
organisation is going through a transformation to agile. Building the right culture in
an organisation is vital to the successful adoption of agile, and business owners can
lean on the fifth agile principle to guide this.

As agile empowers the workers on the ground - the team - to take ownership and
accountability for delivery, managers can encourage the cultivation of agile
principles by providing the right environment for those teams.

Typically referred to as the “development team”, based on agile’s roots in software

development - the team is a self-organising group of motivated individuals who take
on the responsibility of delivery for the product or project. The team makes decisions
and operate collectively, and are collectively accountable for the delivery.

A team could be made up of graphic designers, copywriters, and marketers, all very
different disciplines, but working together. By being cross-functional, a team allows
itself to accelerate delivery by having more people contribute to the same stage of
production.

Visibility and openness are key values in agile, and making the team accountable for
delivery means that the decisions they make and its progress must always be visible
to everyone. The work an agile team does is completely transparent to the business
and to the customers, as well as to each other, and there’s no hidden work or hidden
priorities; everyone involved is aligned to the expectations of the team and their
delivery.

As a self-organising unit, the team makes decisions together, therefore the sixth
agile principle is vital for agile teams to succeed. Managers in an agile organisation
need to give their teams spaces that foster collaboration. This could be achieved by
providing the right sort of office environment, for example, one where workers aren’t
afraid to walk around and make noise to facilitate discussions in person, and with
space to draw diagrams for communicating ideas.

It’s also important to make it easy for agile teams and business people to be based
near each other so that they can work together. Some agile teams have even built
their working area around a central island to make it easier to talk to each other.

Setting up the right physical space to encourage communication is instrumental in

promoting a scaled agile environment across the business, as ease of

© Circus Street Ltd. 10

AGILE LESSON SCRIPT
LESSON 2

communication allows for that all-important aligned delivery. Sharing spaces

between disciplines also means that everyone can easily learn from the continuous
improvements teams might make individually.

The right environment for an agile team will allow them to communicate with
business people and users, and understand both their needs and behaviours. A
simple step towards understanding user behaviour could be to integrate an analytics
tool into the product to give the team the capabilities of tracking user journeys and
assessing exactly what users do in each area. Through this data, the team can
assess where the product is successful and where users are getting stuck, and build
improvements based on this real user data.

More established agile organisations might facilitate “user testing” workshops with
customers, where they observe people using the product that has been built, and
can easily identify where the team could improve the experience.

Some businesses have also created forums for users to provide feedback, with
members of the agile team leading these discussions directly with the customers.
Ultimately, a team that understands user problems can create more tailored solutions
to meet user needs, and improve the product based on their feedback.

To continually observe user behaviour in a quick and digestible way, and to extend
visibility of this process outwards, an agile team might invest in an “information
radiator” - a display of information sets that can utilise real-time data from the
product to present information
at a glance for anyone walking past to see. The information it displays can range
from the number of users currently experiencing errors to a Scrum team’s sprint
progress.

Information radiators are best represented electronically, for example, on a big

screen in the team’s area, and are an excellent way to encourage discussions about
visibility and user needs, both within the team and from other areas of the business.

Most important, but easily overlooked by transitioning corporations, is giving agile

teams the space to self-organise, make decisions, and manage risk by themselves.
The Lean pillar of “respect people” encourages business owners to respect their
employees, giving them autonomy, mastery and purpose to produce innovative
solutions. Managers should instill trust in their teams to get the job done, giving them
the space to try new things, and have the opportunity to fail, reflect, and try again.

© Circus Street Ltd. 11

AGILE LESSON SCRIPT
LESSON 2

To get the most out of agile, the whole company needs be on board, and that could
involve multiple teams of varying disciplines coming together, as well as senior
management signing up to this way of working.

Remember, agile works best for a product when its principles are applied
horizontally across the business. Basing a company culture on agile and Lean
principles, and putting the delivery of customer value at the centre of your concerns
ensures that the business can stay competitive in all areas.

We hope you‘ve been inspired to explore the possibilities of adopting agile in your
business. Thanks for joining us.

© Circus Street Ltd. 12