Presented by Arlen Bankston 2014 Capital One Summit

1. Advancing the Retrospective
Dynamic Lean & Agile Continuous Improvement
Techniques

2. Meet your Presenter
Arlen Bankston
• Co-Founder of LitheSpeed, LLC
• User experience & product
development background
• 14 years of Agile experience
• Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt
• Lately 40% training, 20% each of
coaching, product development &
management
2

3. Agenda
• Retrospectives at a Glance
• Retrospective Techniques
• Lean Retrospectives
• Standard Work Illustrated
• A3 Planning for Improvements
• Learn More about Retrospectives
3

4. Retrospectives at a
Glance

5. Why Retrospect?
Retrospectives are intended to facilitate
improvement, by helping teams:
• Highlight problems with current processes
• Find root causes of issues
• Suggest “countermeasures” to
improve things
• Test these new ways of working
• Adopt them if they’re better
Plan
Check
Act Do
5

6. Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) Thinking
Fire fighting Hero Culture
Plan
Do
Check
Act
Problem solving is a defined method
rooted in the scientific approach –
Slow evolutionary Continuous
Improvement
What We do
Problem
Solution
??
Assumptions,
Unknown Causes,
No Facts
What We Need to Do
Problem
Solution
6

7. Sprint Retrospective at a Glance
Description
• ScrumMaster helps team
inspect & adapt for future
• Inspect people, process,
and product facets
• Identify positive and
negative patterns
• Refactor approach for
upcoming Sprints
Duration
30-60 minutes
Attendees
ScrumMaster (leader), team,
Product Owner, optional
stakeholders
Outputs:
 Process revisions
 Project or team structure revisions
 Quick hit action items
 Long term improvement items
 Understanding of team member perspectives
A retro relies on
double loop learning
7

8. What Should Retrospectives Consider?
Determine
Standards
Standard Work &
Experimentation
Adjust Standard
Work
Assessment
Learning
Teaching
Leading Doing
Process People
Visual Management Systems
Lean Management
Agile Delivery
• Process – Assessing current practices, comparing to Standard Work, and team experimentation to
continuously improve practices, tools and processes.
• People – Role development, skill development, morale and engagement.
• Product – Product discovery, execution, value measurement and iteration.
RoleDevelopment
ProductDelivery
StandardWorkAssessment&Evolution
Discover
Measure
Iterate Build
Product
8

9. Holistic Improvement Teams
Executive Steering Group
for Organizational Improvement
• Set broad, organizational goals
• Define measures of success
• Communicate to middle management and staff frequently
• Review progress regularly
• Address organizational barriers to adoption
Quality Circles for Team Improvement
• A cross-functional problem solving group
• SW Dev, QA, Production, BA, PMO, Resource Managers
• Anticipate, uncover, address tactical issues
• Make recommendations to executive team
9

10. Retrospective Techniques

11. A Sampling of Retrospective Variety
• Sail / Speedboat
Illustrate positive & negative
forces in nautical terms
• Comments & Actions
Stop, Start, More, Less, Appreciations
• Upside / Downside
Two teams consider the most negative
and positive aspects of a situation
Driving (+)
forces
Restraining (-)
forces
http://tastycupcakes.org/2012/10/upside-downside/11

12. More Retrospectives
• Idea / Retrospective Backlog
A list of improvement notions is gathered
and acted upon in consistent fashion.
• Fearless Journey
Use a card game to overcome
obstacles beyond the team’s direct
control.
• Instant Micro-Commenting
Twitter-style comments on specific
events.http://tastycupcakes.org/2012/03/fearless-journey-the-game-that-gets-your-team-unstuck/12

13. Distributed Retrospective Tools
Tools like Sensei can help distributed
teams to drive and track improvement.
13 www.senseitool.com

14. Experiencing a Retrospective
Break into two teams.
Team One:
• List the most horrible aspects of cats, the
ones that make them The Worst Pets
Ever!
Team Two:
• List the most wonderful aspects of cats,
the ones that make them The Best Pets
Ever!14

15. Lean Retrospectives:
Standard Work & A3 Planning

16. What is “Lean?”
• Just-in-Time – Supply what is
needed, when needed, in the
amount needed.
• Jidoka – Halt production and
address quality issues as
encountered.
• Heijunka – Respond smoothly and
efficiently to varying demand.
• Standardized Work – Organize a
job or task in an efficient activity
sequence while minimizing waste.
• Kaizen – “Change for the better.” A
philosophy of continuous
improvement.
16Image Source: http://www.mtu.edu/improvement/continuous-improvement/lean-overview/

17. Standard Work Template
Simply describe how you
do a job today:
• Who needs to do what?
• What information, tools
or other inputs are needed?
• How will the work be performed?
• What are the expected outputs?
• How long should it take (if appropriate)?
* Standardized work training example from Toyota.
Thanks to http://artoflean.com/index.php/2011/01/21/standardized-work/
*
1717

18. Standard Work in a Hospital
Images from http://leanhealthcarewest.com/Page/A3-Problem-Solving
1. Plan
3. Check
4. Act
2. Do
1818

19. Benefits of Standardized Work
• Holistic process improvement
Evolving standards in and across teams
• Expectation management & reliable delivery
Definition of done, working agreements, coding
standards
• Audit & Regulatory support
Well-defined documentation standards
• Organizational learning & training
Rapid bootstrapping of new team members
• Self-organization
Personal ownership & accountability for processes
“Without standards, there can be no Kaizen.”
– Taiichi Ohno
19

20. A Simple Standard Work Process
Drive continuous improvement by establishing
standards, then tasking teams to continuously
improve upon them and share their learnings.
Determine
Standards
• Identify baseline Agile
practices used by teams
or recommended
• Capture current
practices as “Standard
Work” on wall or wiki
Adjust Standard Work
• Quality Circles
reconvene to review
results of A3
experiments
• Adopt or reject process
based on results:
adoption results in
updates to Standard
Work
Standard Work
Experimentation
• Teams experiment with
selected A3(s)
• Teams document
outcomes of
experimentation
A3 Planning
• Hold Quality Circles
comprised of team
members and managers
• Review suggestions for
improvements in the
forms of A3s
• Team members iterate
on suggested A3s
• Vote on A3 suggestions
to implement
20

21. Standard Work
Illustrated

22. Getting “Ready” to Plan a Sprint
Definition of “Ready”
• Choose the few items that your team finds most useful in Sprint Planning.
• Confident and quick Sprint Planning and smooth Sprints that produce
polished results are your goals.
 Interaction Diagrams
 Prototypes
 Wireframes
 Sample Data
 Testable Examples
 Acceptance Criteria
 State Diagrams
 Small Enough
 Agreement from other teams
 RITE / Wizard of Oz / UX Test
 Approvals (Compliance, Security,
Brand Mgmt, etc.)
 Dependency List
 Stakeholder signoff
22

23. When is a Story “Done?”
Definition of “Done”
• A shared definition and compact between Teams and Stakeholders
• Denotes what stories require to be accepted
• Ideally represents “potentially releasable” or even released state
 Acceptance Criteria are met
 Cleared by QA
 Accepted by Tactical PO
 Accepted by Strategic PO
 Live for A/B Testing
 Final Deployment
 Training Script
 Pair reviewed
 Peer Reviewed
 Integrated
 Lightweight usability tested
 Automated testing in place
 User documentation created
 Ops documentation created
23

24. Where Does Standard Work Live?
Standard Work is ideally used as a physical
visual management system.
• On the Wall
Team norms, daily stand-up rules
…but can also be captured digitally for
cross-team improvement.
• In a Wiki
Coding standards, audit repository
24

25. Standard Work for Card Type & Core Values
You can use Standard Work to
define how your current
visual management systems
work, and to evolve them
when better ways are found.
Standard work can also be
applied to illustrate current
working agreements among
teams.
25

26. An Example: Scheduling Reviews (Standard Work)
Background
Three teams working on a single product have stakeholders
that need to attend their respective demos.
Current State (Today’s Standard Work)
These teams have staggered their sprints so that stakeholders
can attend all demos.
The Problem
The staggering has created other issues, in that integration of
the teams’ codebases is now more complex, and demos don’t
represent integrated work.
26

27. A3 Planning for
Continuous Improvement

28. A3 Improvement Process Template
Plan
• What’s the problem?
• Who’s involved in fixing it?
• What’s the targeted goal?
• What are the root causes of the problem?
Do
• How will we try to solve the problem?
Check
• How will we know the problem is solved?
Act
• What’s next?
• How will we document and share the results?
Plan
Check
Act Do
28

29. A3 Example Format
29

30. A3 for New Associate Integration Process
You can use A3s
to improve how
new team
members are
on-boarded.
30

31. A3s for Storage & Estimation Process
You can use A3s to
improve estimation
practices or artifact
storage processes.
31

32. Team Self-Assessment
32
…or help a team review
their performance
against accepted
practices (or current
Standard Work).

33. The Personal A3 – Developing People
33
…or help individuals and
managers visualize
personal growth paths
and aspirations.

34. Validation Board for Product Experimentation
34
…or track and visualize
product experiments
and their results.

35. How typical Agile roles might take part in Standard Work:
• ScrumMasters & Team Leads – Own Assessment and Standard Work
practices for their teams, lead adaptation through retrospectives
• Functional Managers – Drive Standard Work improvements through
direct assistance and provision of coaching, training & tools
• Agile Working Group – Review Standard Work patterns across
departments and drive common support like training and presentations
• Agile Teams – Identify improvement areas in working agreements and
coding standards, experiment to advance standard work over time
• Product Owners – Look for ways to enhance feedback loops and
interfaces with agile teams, external stakeholders, customers and users
Process Improvement Roles & Responsibilities
35

36. An Example: Scheduling Reviews (A3)
Background:
Three teams working on a single
product have stakeholders that need
to attend their respective demos.
Current State:
These teams have staggered their
sprints so that stakeholders can
attend all demos.
Analysis:
The staggering has created another
issue, in that integration of the
teams’ codebases is now more
complex, and demos don’t represent
integrated work.
Proposed Solution:
Describe a new process that might
address the conflicting goals.
Plan:
What: Describe the steps you would
take to implement your solution.
Who: Our Team
When: 12/15/13
Expected Results:
1. What do you think is likely to
happen once this solution has
been implemented?
2. How will you measure the
results?
36

37. Learn More about
Retrospectives

38. Tips for Effective Retrospectives
• Workers define and improve
their own day-to-day work
• Managers review and support
improvements to big-picture processes
• Make standards visible and obvious
• Incent & celebrate improvements
• Share learning across teams
38

39. Retrospective References
• Managing to Learn – Shook
• Lean Thinking – Womack & Jones
• Understanding A3 Thinking – Sobek
• The Checklist Manifesto – Gawande
• The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership –
Liker & Convis
• Agile Retrospectives – Derby & Larsen
• Tasty Cupcakes –
www.tastycupcakes.org
39

40. Contact LitheSpeed for Further Information
Arlen Bankston
Arlen.Bankston@lithespeed.co
m
Sanjiv Augustine
Sanjiv.Augustine@lithespeed.co
m
www.lithespeed.com
40
How we can help:
• Training – Agile Developer,
Executive, Kanban,
Coaching Agile Teams, and
more!
• Coaching – Process &
engineering help
• Organizational Consulting
- Create a robust agile
delivery & support
capability