My Agile Journey (By Zubair)

MY AGILE JOURNEY.

By: Zubair

As a Scrum Master I’m relatively new in my agile journey, roughly 8 to 9 months of experience. Frankly, it can be a lucrative and frustrating career. Servant leadership is hard to teach others and practice, which makes it profitable. It is frustrating because you are struggling against decades of entrenched thinking inside the business. Fortunately, I have an excellent personal support system and a sincere devotion to what I do.
I was given a small team to work with initially. 7 GREAT team mates! Getting them here and instilling an AGILE mindset and the MANY challenges I faced is for another blog.

Anyways, I digress..
SO, …. after getting my feet wet with my PILOT AGILE TEAM, I was quickly entrusted to lead an agile enterprise transformation with not only my company, but its many sister companies as well.
Seemed like a daunting task, as I am not an enterprise agile coach, and many weeks of restlessness followed. When I was asked to start the transition with two of our sister companies first, and just 3 months into my new role.

SOME HISTORY—-
These two sister companies of ours needed Agile the most. I knew they needed it! And sensed the frustration and worked within the turmoil as a QA automation specialist on those projects previously.
Collectively, their pain points were the same. After a year’s wait for working software to be delivered, their responses were always the same. “THIS IS NOT QUITE WHAT WE WANTED or THIS IS NOT OUR WORKFLOW!”
Where did we go wrong? We asked ourselves many times. I was always privileged to be on a project from its inception due to my manager’s trust, so kind of knew where it could have gone south.
• Could it have been just the 3 to 4 days of requirement gathering for a years’ worth of work?
• Could it have been some assumptions in the BRD not being clarified further?
• Was it ambiguities in requirements?
• Was it the lack of transparency and collaboration with the ones doing the work and the ones asking what to build?

When a project is close to failure a lot of changes are made at the end to correct its trajectory. This affects all parties involved as more work is added changing requirements around. Therefore, long hours are put in to meet deadlines set in stone. Time with the family is sacrificed, and frustration is at an all-time high.
Quite frankly, putting software together like a product on an assembly line simply was not working. I always wanted to change the process but was simply not in any position to change anything as a QA engineer.
BUT, I had dreams and aspirations to make a change just like many of you. I studied AGILE got certified and came with a proposition to my managers and executive’s. Voilà, I was promoted to an SM with an S on my chest!
THE DAY OF THE AGILE PRESENTATION TO THE EXECUTIVES OF OUR TWO SISTER COMPANIES.

I had a severe stomach ache because of anxiety, and just wanted to take a flight back to Chicago and hide somewhere. However, as I pointed earlier I have a strong support system. I manned up after getting advice from my COACH Sam, and essentially a reality check to man up. I finally calmed my nerves, as I had practiced hard, and was prepared with my presentation slides and knew exactly what I wanted to discuss!
Before I presented, I asked the executives a simple question. “What if I told you guys and gals that you don’t have to do User Acceptance testing anymore, and that we will have quality working software for you every 2 weeks that’s tested and demoed.”

This question set the tone and the enthusiasm in their voices saying “YES!” fueled me to give my presentation with confidence.

I discussed our current way of delivering software and told them it is just not feasible to do anymore. I discussed agile and its differences between waterfall. Followed up with knowledge transfer of Scrum and Kanban.
THEY WERE ON BOARD!

I quickly defined our PO’s and set the teams that I wanted to work with for success. I picked the best team mates who I knew wanted to see change. We have been successful as a team proving to our sister companies to love real AGILE.

Closing thoughts to my fellow colleagues who are in “Agile-ish” environments.
My coach Sam instilled in me that we are change agents and this resonated with me deeply. So I make every effort to fight bad agile. Bad agile happens because self-interest and the status quo are more important than getting work done. We tolerate double standards, and it creates corruption. It is up to us as coaches to reveal this corruption so we can mitigate its effects. It is up to each of us to show instead of telling others what to do.