← Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
The Challenges of Trying Too Hard in an Agile Transformation | Robert Finan
00:16:26
Robert Finan: The Challenges of Trying Too Hard in an Agile Transformation Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. ...
Loading summary
Transcript25 lines
- [00:04]
Vasco Duarte
Hey, how are you doing? I'm Vasco Duarte, your host on the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. And I've got some exciting news. So right now, as I record this, I'm holding in my hand the signed contract for our very first Global Agile Summit. We're all in and I couldn't wait to share this news with you. So mark your calendars. May 18th, 20th of 2025 in Tallinn, Estonia. We're gonna have a transformative experience. We're putting together an event that is all about real life Agile. It's not theory or buzzwords. It's practitioners sharing what's working, what's making an impact, and how they've overcome challenges that you too will have to face, or maybe even facing. Right now, we're bringing together the best stories in Agile. From product leaders to engineering wizards to business, these will be stories that will inspire you to action. This isn't just another conference. It's a chance to connect with the people that are shaping the future of Agile. And here's the best part. Right now, we're in our super early bird phase. And that means you can grab tickets at just 25% of the final price. Look, that's not just half off, it's half off of the half off. It's an incredible deal for our dedicated community members, just like you listening to this right now. So at the summit, day one will be all about hands on workshops. And days two and three, we'll dive into leadership, product strategy, coding, testing, and everything that makes Agile thrive in organizations. Right now remember, these are all first person, real life stories. Now whether you're a leader, a developer, or part of a consulting company, this event is built to take your Agile game to the next level. So don't wait. Go to globalagilesummit.com and grab your ticket. Today, let's all make 2025 the year agile truly transforms your teams, your business and our industry. I'll see you all in Tallinn. And Remember, go to globalagilesummit.com and get your super early bird ticket right now. It only be available until the agenda is announced, so don't wait. Grab it right now. Right now that that's out of the way, onto the episode.
- [02:40]
Robert Finnan
Hello, everybody.
- [02:41]
Vasco Duarte
Welcome to one more week of the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. And this week, joining us from Austria, we have an Irish person, Robert Finnan. Hey Robert, welcome to the show.
- [02:52]
Robert Finnan
Hi Vasco. Thanks very much for having me.
- [02:55]
Vasco Duarte
If you guys are drinking coffee out there, please stop drinking. You might snort it because the conversation with Robert is surely gonna be a fun time. So make sure you put your coffee away before you start listening. Anyway, so Robert's been knocking around in it for over 25 years, just about the same time as I have. That's interesting. For the last 10 years, he has been knee deep in the messy, real agile transformation. That's long enough to be called an agile coach, he thinks. I think it's more than enough for that, but not long enough to actually experience successful agile transformations. And I'm so sorry for you on that regard, but we'll explore that for sure. And he has documented his highs and lows in the Agile Drill Sergeant web. So the link is in the show notes. Make sure to check that out. And I'm sure by the end of this episode, and then we still have four more episodes, I'm sure you will definitely want to read about the Agile Drill sergeant. Robert, that was a short intro. Tell us a little bit more about yourself and how did you end up becoming a Scrum Master?
- [04:11]
Robert Finnan
By mistake, obviously. You know, the funny thing is I actually did my PhD in artificial neural networks and recognizing people's voices back in the day when it wasn't like whatever they have now, 6 billion, 1,000 million trillion nodes. We had like 20 nodes and three hidden layers. And it didn't work that well back then. We didn't even really call it artificial intelligence the way it's called. Everything's called like that today. But I worked in that speech area and from that speech area I ended up going into speech as a, you know, as a. In the telco area and working on stuff like interactive voice response systems. So we built what you might call Siri, this kind of voice portal thing for telephones back in 2004. Okay, nobody needed it. It wasn't very useful. It could read your emails, it could tell you your horoscope and the news and what's on the cinema. It can read things. It was actually a lovely little piece of programming, but absolutely pointless. But we had to have one because everyone had one. So. So I was in this area and then I realized at some point really what I'm doing is I'm writing software. So actually what I'm actually involved in is software less so telco. I wanted to get into the software area of things. And then one of the projects I did just before I finished up, we had to get a project finished in like we had six months after a merger to get a bunch of call center workflows or flows in the IVR up and running. In six months for the merger. So there's one telephone number. You call that number and we can route to the two different companies underneath, so to speak, and put the calls in the right place. And we were under a lot of pressure, so we did it. We started, you know, I just a little bit experience at that point with Scrum and we used Scrum to do that and I was hooked. Okay, Vaska, you gotta understand, we have gray hair.
- [06:00]
Vasco Duarte
Okay.
- [06:00]
Robert Finnan
We've been in this game for a while. In your case, there's even less hair, but now it's gray, it's white.
- [06:06]
Vasco Duarte
Whatever is left of it is gray.
- [06:09]
Robert Finnan
Yeah, I've asked. I remember waterfall projects when they were waterfall projects. Three year projects, 8 million euros. Okay. That was the kind of planning we had.
- [06:22]
Vasco Duarte
And that was the original schedule. Because the real schedule was a lot longer.
- [06:26]
Robert Finnan
Yes. And this is, this is the bit where you went, oh my God. And then you do your first like Scrum project and you're basically working. I was working closely with the customer center, customer call center guys, and we were working together in our bi weekly rhythm. We were changing stuff on the fly. I was going, do you really need this for the launch? Do you need this for the launch? And I was just like going, wow, this is how to do a project. So I was hooked. Unfortunately, I was a bit too hooked. And I believe now that I'd understood the glory of Scrum, everybody else should as well, which I think that comes up in one of your other questions later on. But this is how I ended up getting into Scrum. And I basically, I was like that first time I decided as a product owner, I mean I was, I was literally, I was programming some of the stuff. I was the architect, I was the project manager, and in effect I was the product owner as well for the technical side of it. And that kicked it off. That was about 14 years ago, 2010, thereabouts. And I kicked it off. That's.
- [07:17]
Vasco Duarte
And when we do get hooked, we do get excited, just as you said you were at the time. But excitement isn't always the best companion to have with us when we are still learning what this whole Agile and Scrum thing is about. And of course, today's Monday here on the podcast, so we explore a story of failure. And of course we want to do that because it opens up a lot of lessons learned that we can explore. So, Robert, tell us that story. I mean, we'll go into the takeaways later, but tell us that story first.
- [07:47]
Robert Finnan
Well, that story where we got the software Done in time, in the six months was the failure. I virtually burnt out after four months and had to leave. Actually, I was happy the project was going to make it to its date, but I was trying too hard to push something in an organization that was not ready for this. Now I was.
- [08:10]
Vasco Duarte
Tell me what, what did that look like in practice when you were there on the day to day? What did pushing too hard look like in practice?
- [08:19]
Robert Finnan
We wanted to change. So what we thought, we thought we were going to be very clever and we were trying to involve operations and a lot of people in Scrum team to kind of get this end to end effect so that we could deliver properly. Okay. And what was happening was we were crashing up against, we're thinking 2010 at the time, in a telco, 2011, 10, 11. And we're crashing up against organizational structures that are basically embedded in an old system of we have hardware and we have this process for doing things and there's an acceptance testing and there's a user manual and then there's the operations manual and there's all these strictures and processes and really, really, really rigid things outside the team. So inside the team we're flexible, we're changing things back and forth and then outside the team and we say, well this could change every two weeks and we'd like to deploy it. And they're going, no, you can't do that. So I was fighting to try and get this kind of flexibility in terms of in a more end to end way, not just in the team itself and trying to get management to change, to change around the processes and some of the people involved and stuff like that so we could be more flexible. And that really did not. You know, I was pretty much out on my own trying to do this one man, as is often the case, this kind of bottom up, pushing against things, the powerless change, so to speak. And as you said, as it was my first time trying to do this, I didn't do it very well. I wasn't very clever about this. But if you don't make those mistakes, how do you learn?
- [09:54]
Vasco Duarte
Yeah, yeah, we all have to like it's an inevitable part of the learning process and the try to avoid it the more we fall into it. That's the unfortunate realization after many years usually. But to help our friends out there who are listening to us right now to avoid this, let's go through that from the perspective of the lessons learned. Robert so if you would go through that story again, what would you do differently today?
- [10:27]
Robert Finnan
Oh my. Kind of the Way I summarize how I see things now, I have to admit, if I'm honest, Vasco, it took me another couple of lessons to get this. I wasn't, you know, you think I'd have learned it the first time. It took one or two more attempts at this. But I really tried to meet people, teams and organizations where they are and not where I think they should be. So I'm really trying to where are people at the moment? So I came in with my glorious vision of where we should be and what we should be doing and I wasn't looking at where are we at the moment or where is the company at the moment and what would be a viable, acceptable change for them given where they are at the moment, rather than me coming in and saying, you've got to jump from this really rigid organization to a really flexible agile organization. Which was never going to happen. So my thing is always now. These days it's a lot of pragmatism and less dogmatism. It's like, okay, what's in the pragmatic approach here? Where are we at the moment and what would be a really good improvement from where we are at the moment that that would be acceptable to both sides, so to speak.
- [11:32]
Vasco Duarte
So the pragmatism is of course a very high level word and concept. We need to break it down to our listeners out there who haven't yet gone through the lessons that you've gone through. So the way I hear you say it, I translate it in my mind to okay, so in this case pragmatism means not trying to figure out what I think they should do, but rather trying to assess what they think they could do next to become better. Now here's the problem I have with this, Robert. I'm all for meeting people where they are and that's what I try to do as well. But sometimes people are at a point where they just very comfortable with waterfall. And I see this happening even with agilists. Today, for example, I get people coming to me and saying, oh yeah, but Scrum is just burning people out. And I think to myself, I don't necessarily tell them that, but I think to myself, you obviously have not experienced the waterfall project yet if you think that Scrum burns you out. So I have this contrast, or rather I would say conundrum, right, because I totally agree with you. We have to meet people where they are. But sometimes where people are is not going to get them anywhere. So how do you these days do that work with the people where you are meeting Them where they are, but also opening up the door of possibilities for them.
- [12:59]
Robert Finnan
So I went through about, I'm going to say, like, three different. So I had the phase where I thought everybody should just get it. I'm going to shout at you about how cool scrum and agile is. You should get it. I mean, God, if you don't get it, you must be stupid. Just look, I've got to explain it to you in more detail. This is so cool. Okay. I ignored their world. Then I kind of swung too much, I'm going to say too much. A little bit too far into coaching, where I felt like I was like, oh, well, if, you know, I've got to tell you guys about it, but you're not interested. I'm not going to push, okay? I'm not going to open the door up and show you this beautiful world on the other side. But if you don't want to go through, hey, that's your call. And in the end of the day, I still genuinely believe that they're not motivated to do something. It's pointless doing it. But I am now sort of in a position where I think, look, a little nudge. We need to try something out. We need to experiment. You need to get a little bit of a test of flavor for this. Okay, you need to try. But I, I love to sell. I try to sell experiments. If you go into rigid organizations, other places like that, and you say we're going to change something, they think, oh, it's going to stay like this. I nearly cursed. It's going to stay like this. It's going to stay like this for the next eight years. Okay? And so how do you go into a place where. Where they're used to something being if something changes, it's permanent, to kind of get them into the idea, hey, can we try something out? Can we please try something out? If you don't like it, in three months, we're going to review this and we'll change it. We'll stop if you don't like it. But could we try this little thing out in between and see how you feel about it? And that's sort of where I am with this kind of thinking about these things at the moment. How do we get them to experiment?
- [14:29]
Vasco Duarte
I like that Pragmatism becomes, let's just experiment, let's try something else. And then it's possible to meet them where they are. Because the thing that I've learned in my own experience is that people are always ready to try something else as long as we are able to give them the permission to show what they really want to try. Yeah. Yeah.
- [14:50]
Robert Finnan
And it's. It's very much. There's another thing. It's probably a different discussion, but there are the rules of the game as well within a given company. If the rules of the game of the company are, you go to the project steering committee, you say, this project is going to take two years and costs 8 million. Okay? And everybody in that project steering committee knows that in a year and a half's time, you're going to turn up and say, I'm not going to be able to deliver this. Actually, it's going to take a year longer than planned and we're going to cut another extra 4 million. And if that's acceptable, and that's the game. They're the rules of the game of that company. My view is you don't need Agile, okay? You're wasting your time. They're playing with a different set of rules now. It's not that I haven't seen agile teams within these contexts. I'm just saying on that level, you don't try and change it. They don't want to. They don't feel the need, they don't feel the pain, they don't feel the pressure to do it. Now's not the right time for them.
- [15:42]
Vasco Duarte
Now is not the right time. And that's such a powerful statement. Now is not the right time. Robert, that was a great story. Thank you for sharing that with us.
- [15:50]
Robert Finnan
Cool.
- [15:56]
Vasco Duarte
We really hope you liked our show. And if you did, why not rate this podcast on Stitcher or itunes. Share this podcast and let other Scrum masters know about this valuable resource for their work. Remember that sharing is caring.