Easy Agile Podcast Ep.23: How to navigate your cloud migration journey

"Lieschen's wealth of experience is absolutely incredible! Not only did she provide invaluable advice, but I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation."

In this episode Caitlin Mackie is joined by Lieschen Gargano Sr, Release Train Engineer at Scaled Agile. They delve into the role of the Release Train Engineer, sharing tips and tricks, FLOW activities, lessons learned and how to get started in the role. With SAFe Summit 2023 just around the corner, Lieschen also takes some time to talk about what she’s most excited about for the event and shared some advice for first time attendees.

If Lieschen's expertise and passion have piqued your interest, be sure to explore the Scaled Agile RTE course. It provides comprehensive training, equipping you with the necessary skills and knowledge to excel as an RTE.

Scaled Agile RTE course

We hope you enjoy the episode!

Transcript:

Caitlin Mackie:

Hi there. Welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast. I'm Caitlin, your host for today's episode. At Easy Agile we specialize in developing apps for Atlassian Jira that help your team move from simply doing agile to truly being agile. Our apps have gained recognition and trust from over 160,000 users across top companies worldwide. With our products, teams can transform their flat Jira backlogs into something visually meaningful and easy to understand. Whether it's sprint planning, retrospectives, or PI planning, our apps are designed to foster seamless team alignment.

Before we begin the episode, we would like to say an acknowledgement of country. This is part of our ongoing commitment towards reconciliation. Easy Agile would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast today. We pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging, and extend that same respect to all Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander and First Nations people joining us today. Let's jump into today's episode. So today I'm joined by Lieschen Gargano, a senior release train engineer at Scaled Agile. Lieschen is a highly experienced professional when it comes to change management, system design and stakeholder engagement, and has a passion for developing teams and connecting strategy to execution. Lieschen welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast.

Lieschen Gargano:

Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

Caitlin Mackie:

So Lieschen, you are a release train engineer. For our listeners, can you explain a little bit about the role? For anyone that's not familiar, how would you describe a Release Train Engineer?

Lieschen Gargano:

Yeah. I think one of the easiest ways for people to think of a Release Train Engineer is kind of like a coach or scrum master for the art, for the Agile release train. A servant leader facilitating all of those art events, facilitating the processes and process improvements. And really measured in value delivery, and using flow metrics to measure those improvements and support of the arts.

Caitlin Mackie:

So you mentioned flow metrics there. I've heard a lot about this recently and optimizing flow. What are some of those flow activities that a RT is responsible for?

Lieschen Gargano:

I like to look at feature flow and cycle time. So really looking like are we bringing all of our features in progress at once or are we managing our WIP, not just at the team level but at the art level. Are we taking the whole PI to get a feature through the system, or are we able to finish something before we start the next thing? So I look at that a lot and also just are we making and meeting commitments. Those PI objectives that we set, are we in that 80-100% range? A lot of people want full credit, extra credit and to be in the 120, but for us, predictability really means you tried really hard and you stretched, but you also still made and met commitments. So I look at that really closely too.

Caitlin Mackie:

I love that. You mentioned just then quite a lot of different responsibilities that a RTE has. Do you think that there is one in particular that you really need to get right from the start?

Lieschen Gargano:

Oh, as an RTE, I think the biggest thing is building the relationships and intention. As a servant leader, we really are there to help make the art better, to make being on the art enjoyable and productive and flow. So building that trust and those relationships as a servant leader is the first thing. If you get that wrong, no one will help you do the rest.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah-

Lieschen Gargano:

And you need a lot of help. You're not doing anything alone as an RTE.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yes. Yeah, for sure. I can definitely imagine that. Let's go a little bit deeper on that servant leadership that you just mentioned. Can you share your approach and what servant leadership means to you?

Lieschen Gargano:

Servant leadership to me is helping people understand the direction, communicating early and often so that they know where you're going. And then not just saying, "how can I help you get there? What can I do?" But saying, "how can we go together?" A lot of coaching and understanding the problem to solve and connecting it to how it benefits the people. Just like we ask them to connect their work to how it benefits the customer. As the RT, they're my customer. How does what I'm asking you to change benefit you? Not changing is always easier than changing even if we don't like our current state. So why is it worth it?

Caitlin Mackie:

I love that. Yeah, always asking the why and being really clear on it. Yeah, I think that's great. I've done some LinkedIn digging of your profile, as you do, had a little bit of a stalk and noticed that you hosted a webinar recently on tips and tricks and lessons learned as an RTE. Can we start with maybe some tips and tricks? What can you share?

Lieschen Gargano:

The first thing I will say is lean on the Scrum master team, and if you're lucky enough to have an Agile coach or another RTE, lean on that team. Your lean Agile Center of Excellence, those people have the expertise. They're also building the relationships. They're there to help you. Don't try to just prove yourself or go it alone, it's not possible. That team is your team for success. So 100% go to them. They're a wealth of knowledge, a wealth of relationships, and the best support.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, I know it's so important to have that support network around you. You just mentioned the Agile Center of Excellence. Maybe for some of our listeners aren't familiar, could you explain what that is?

Lieschen Gargano:

Yeah, so the Lean Agile Center of Excellence can look a few different ways depending on your organization. At our organization, it is the coach, release managers, RTEs and Scrum masters or team coaches. And some larger organizations than ours might have that hub and spoke model of a centralized change leader. And then RTEs and Scrum masters that are in different arts and around the org. And some even have separate laces in different parts of the organization if it's really big. But really they are that community of practice that holds your lean Agile practices and the standards of those practices and talks to each other and debates and evolves them to make sure that it's consistent throughout the org. That the org is getting consistent coaching, consistent guidance, and they're not being told five different things about how to transform. Because again, change and being lean is so hard. If you add too many voices into that coaching, it gets really overwhelming for folks.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yes, 100%. And an Agile transformation is already overwhelming as it is, so you can imagine that laid on top. I suppose speaking, if we explore a little bit around those on an agile transformation journey, at what point would you say it's important that that lean Agile Center of Excellence is formed?

Lieschen Gargano:

Oh, I think it should be in place pretty quick. I mean, we talk about training your leaders, training your experts and then doing safer teams and launching trains. You need that Center of Excellence there from the start so that they can go out to the rest of the org that they can do all that training and they can be there to support people through title changes, role changes. Launching an art can feel very scary to folks. If you don't have that in place beforehand, you're going to have a lot to reel in after the fact.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, I really like that. It's almost having this really solid foundation and unified voice to sort of go forward and support the rest of the org.

Lieschen Gargano:

And it's so great to have consultants support, to have partners come in and help you and to have the right tools, but they need the help of people inside. They need that lean Agile Center of Excellence of employees inside the company to help you be successful. As an RTE, you need your team. Anybody, any tool, any people trying to do a change, a transformation are going to need that Center of Excellence because all those parts, that's what makes the whole.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So you mentioned as an RTE, a big tip or trick is to rely on that lean Agile Center of Excellence. What do you think has been your biggest lesson learned as an RT?

Lieschen Gargano:

There are a few things that have been particularly difficult for me. One of them is that I don't like to say no and not in that I take on too much or whatever, but more in that if someone has passion for something, I want them to be able to take it on. I want them to be able to move forward with it. And there are times where we really have to say it's too much change. It's too much for this group to manage. In particular, the Scrum Masters and RTEs people come to us for a lot of things and they need that consistency from us, and they need predictability in a change to feel like we know where they're going and if we introduce too many things or if we try to hold too many things at once, it's easy for us to forget about it later or drop something else. So learning when and how to say no, again not necessarily in that capacity way, but just in the width of change, if that makes sense.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, definitely. I think that what you just said there, learning how and when to say no. I think that's not even exclusive to the RTE role as well. I think that's an amazing piece of advice for anyone listening and to share across our audiences, because I know it's definitely something I struggle with as well. So that's my takeaway from this is to, okay, I'm going to constantly imagine like 'no Lieschen told me to when and how to say no', and just focus on that. So yeah, I think that's a great piece of advice. What was your journey like to an RTE? I know we caught up last week and I got a little sneak preview into this, and I know it wasn't straightforward, so if you can share a little bit about that, that would be great.

Lieschen Gargano:

Yeah. I actually started in conflict resolution. I worked in public private reconciliation doing a lot of natural resources facilitation, so hundreds of people, governments, companies, private landowners, residents, trying to bring all those people together to get to consensus or at least to build relationships that allow them to move forward. So really strong foundation and facilitation in particular, and just day-to-day conflict. When we say conflict, we get so worried, 'oh, I don't do conflict', well conflict's everything all the time. It's all the disagreements we need to succeed in life. So that gave me a great foundation when I became a scrum master, and I did that for a few years working with development teams. One of my favorite teams was our infrastructure team, 10 foot pole because no one wanted to touch their work or the 10 foot pole, and I learned so much there and eventually became a coach and started doing more strategic planning and coaching parts of the organization that weren't used to being on arts. Marketing and other groups, which helped me transition to Scaled Agile, where I started working with our CMO and as he grew the marketing team, helping coach that marketing group into an agile way of working, a safe way of working, before actually becoming a product owner, because I loved organizing around value, and I loved those different topics that we were working on internally.

And one of the people I work with at Scale Agile said, "well, help us develop the product then for everybody else". So I did that for a little while, which gave me so much power in that learning how to say no and prioritize and coaching people to decisions is one thing, but as the product owner, I had to practice being where the buck stopped. There are five right decisions, just make one so that people are unblocked, and that prepared me really well for transitioning into RT.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. You have such a wealth of experience there across so many different roles, and you can really see that each of those key roles have taught you something valuable that you can take into this RTE role. So I think that's amazing. It's so cool to see that even though it's not this straightforward linear journey, there's all these parts that there's traits within each that ladder up to helping you succeed as an RT. So I think that's really cool.

Lieschen Gargano:

And I know people are afraid to make some of those lateral moves sometimes, but the skills that you can build might just be that thing that gets you other open doors that you didn't even think about.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. Yeah. I absolutely love that. Yeah, just embrace every opportunity for what it may be, what it may not be. You don't know until you give it a shot. So I think, yeah, I love that. I think that's really great advice. So everything we've spoken about in regards to being a Release Train Engineer may have really hit the spot for some of our listeners. How does someone get there? Were there certifications, courses? What's the process that way?

Lieschen Gargano:

Another thing I probably did backwards. I started with a scrum master cert and then actually ended up getting a SPC certification through Scaled Agile when I was a coach. Because I was a coach before I was an RTE, and I learned about so many other parts of the business that way. But then to become an actual RTE, taking the safe RTE course, but then actually there's a community of RTEs... Which we didn't really talk about this, but being an RTE is a lonely thing. I said earlier, if you're lucky to have another RTE, this is a lonely role. You're really kind of on your own. So not just getting that cert, but being part of that community and being able to send people messages and ask them crazy questions was part of my certification process, but also just community building to where I could feel like I had the connections and competence. So yeah, I found all of them similar to holding each of the roles, also getting that certification, just another tool in the tool belt.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, for sure. I don't want to touch on something you said there about an RTE being sometimes quite a lonely role. What do you think makes it lonely?

Lieschen Gargano:

It's a role that a lot of people have strong opinions about what they need and what success looks like based on where they are in the organization. And there are usually few of you, and even if you're in a large organization with many, you're with your art, you're very focused on your section, and so having all of those pulls and expectations and not having anyone who understands what that feels like just makes it kind of lonely. Now that we have two RTEs and a coach at Scaled Agile, it makes a big difference for me because they are right there in it with me and it's very helpful.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. You can see in that scenario why that community of RTEs is like you said, so important to lean on them as well. Yeah.

Lieschen Gargano:

I find even just connecting to RT's outside our organization too. I grabbed beers with one a couple weeks ago. Those little things, even if you can find that person, meet them at a summit, meet them out in the wild, find them on LinkedIn and just say, "Hey, we live in the same area. We have the same role". It can go a long way because it may seem weird to reach out like that, but they probably are looking for that connection too.

Caitlin Mackie:

Thank you so much for sharing. And for any of our listeners, I might pop some links to any certifications and some scout Agile courses. I'll pop that in our episode notes, so feel free to check those out. You mentioned about connecting with other RTs and meeting at summits, which is a really nice segue to the next part of our conversation. Just around the corner is the 2023 Safe Summit and we're heading to Nashville Music City. What can we expect from Safe Summit? What are you looking forward to?

Lieschen Gargano:

Well, what I'm most looking forward to is that I am putting together an RTE breakfast. So all RTEs are welcome, or even if you're a solution train engineer or you do the role of an RTE with a different title. I'm really excited to meet with those folks over breakfast and just chat it out. And my goal with that really is to have people to connect with so that as we go through the rest of the summit, listening to the talks that we have people enroll, that we can check back in with over drinks and stuff on the later days and say, 'oh, what do you think? How might that work?' So that's what I'm most looking forward to.

Caitlin Mackie:

Amazing.

Lieschen Gargano:

But obviously there are going to be some great talks and the product labs are always really fun. We get to play with the product together.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, cool. Tell me a little bit about the product labs, what's involved in that?

Lieschen Gargano:

The product team puts it together and they have computers set up and you can bring your own and they talk through some of the new releases or things they're working on and help you log into it and use it in your context, but also try to get some feedback on how it works or how you might use it in your organization. So it's a nice two-way street. It's sort of, 'I need this, how might I do it?' And then them saying, 'well, why don't you try and let me see how it works and how we should change it based on how you interact with it'. So it's just really fun. It feels really practical because it's so hands on.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, amazing. I love that. I'm definitely going to have to try and come along and suss that out. It sounds really great. Where do you hope or where do you think we'll see a lot of conversations focused at this year's Safe Summit?

Lieschen Gargano:

At Safe Summit I think the conversations will be really focused on just the day-to-day of Safe. We have new topics that come up. We obviously have new ideas that are going to be presented. But every time I go to one of these, it really is the connecting one-on-one to say, here's where I'm stuck, here's what I'm trying to learn. So we'll hear a lot about Flow, we'll hear about Team Topologies, but we'll also hear those 'I'm just getting started and we're stuck, we have change fatigue. We don't know if our arts are set up correctly'. A lot of those classic conversations that are just really impactful and why people come together.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I love that. Creating these spaces for people to bond over shared experiences and problems they're facing or wins they're seeing and sharing them. I think that's where these events are amazing for creating that kind of environment. Lieschen, this is my very first Safe Summit. I haven't been to one before and I'm really excited. What advice would you have for first time attendees, returning attendees, what's the way to get the most out of Safe Summit?

Lieschen Gargano:

If you're attending with other people from your organization, the best thing is to split up so you can cover more ground and then come back together and share. The second advice is find people with a similar role as you, because again, you can do that same thing with those folks and split up and then meet up again and try to talk about it in your context. It's great to do that at the parties too, because we throw great parties, but that's the best because no matter what room you end up in, what talk you end up at, you're going to get a great nugget. But where it really sinks in for me is talking with someone else about what I heard and then thinking about, 'okay what does that mean?', when I go home.

Caitlin Mackie:

Amazing, great advice Lieschen. If anyone listening happens to also be attending Safe Summit and they see Lieschen on the floor or myself, make sure you say hello, and if you've got any questions for Lieschen about the podcast episode, I'm sure she'll be more than happy to answer and engage in a great conversation. And anyone looking to get advice around the RTE role, make sure you find her and have a chat. Lieschen I'm really excited to meet in person. We've done this podcast with yourself in the States, myself in Australia, so I'm excited to connect over in your world. And yeah, really thank you so much for your time. I hope you enjoyed the episode. I know, I sure did.

Lieschen Gargano:

I did. Thank you.

Caitlin Mackie:

Thanks, Lieschen.

"Really enjoyed my conversation with William and Riz, I'm looking forward to implementing their recommendations with our team" - Angad Sethi

In this epsiode I spoke with William Rojas and Rizwan Hasan from Adaptavist about the ways we can enable high performing agile teams:

• The significance of team alignment
• When and where you should be using tools to assist with your team objectives
• Prioritizing what conversations you need to be apart of
• Advice for remote teams

Subscribe/Listen on your favorite podcasting app.

Thanks William & Rizwan!

Transcript

Angad Sethi:

Good afternoon/evening/morning everyone. How you guys going?

Rizwan Hasan:

Oh, good. Thanks Angad.

William Rojas:

Yeah. How are you?

Angad Sethi:

Yeah, really good. Really, really stoked to be having a chat with you guys. Should we start by introducing ourselves? Riz, would you like to take it?

Rizwan Hasan:

Sure. My name's Riz Hasan, I'm based in Brussels, Belgium. Very newly based here, actually used to be based in New York, not too far from William. We usually used to work together on the same team. My role here at Adaptavist is I'm a team lead for our consulting group in EMEA. So in the European region and in the UK. So day to day for me is a lot of internal management, but also working with customers and my consultants on how our customers are scaling agile and helping them with tool problems, process problems, people problems, all the above.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Yeah. Sounds awesome.

William Rojas:

As for myself, William Rojas. I'm actually based out of a little suburban town called Trumble in Connecticut, which is about an hour plus northeast of New York, basically. And as Rez mentioned, yeah, we've worked for a number of years we've worked together, we were running a agile transformation and scaling adoption team for Adaptavist. My new role now is actually I took on a presales principle, basically a presale principle consultant these days. It's actually a new role within Adaptavist, and what we do is we have, actually all of us, I think most of us are all like ex-consultants that support the pre-sales process, and work in between the sales team, and the delivery team, and all the other teams that support our clients at Adaptavist.

Angad Sethi:

Awesome, awesome.

William Rojas:

I help find to solutions for clients and make the proposals and support them through, get them on through delivery.

Angad Sethi:

I'm Angad, I'm a software developer and I'm working on Easy Agile programs and Easy Agile roadmaps, two of the products we offer for the Atlassian marketplace. We're super excited to speak to you guys about how your teams are operating in, like what's a day to day. Riz, would you like to answer that?

Rizwan Hasan:

Sure. Yeah. So apart from like the internal management stuff, I think what's particular to this conversation is how we walk clients through how to navigate planning at scale, right?

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

I'm working with a client right now who's based in the states, but they're acquiring other software companies left and right. Which I think is also a trend that's happening within this SaaS ecosystem. And when that happens, they're trying to bring all that work in together. So we're talking through ways of how to visualize all that in an easy way that isn't really too much upfront heavy with identifying requirements or understanding what systems we want to pull in, but more so what do you want to pull in? So really right now, in this phase of the data that I'm working with this client, it's really just those initial conversations about what are you planning? What are you doing? What's important to you? So it's a lot of these conversations about that.

Angad Sethi:

And so you mentioned it's a lot of internal management. Are some of your clients fellow workmates, or are they external clients?

Rizwan Hasan:

They're mostly internal because I manage a team, so I have different people who are working on different types of projects where they might be doing cloud migrations. They might be doing some scripting work. In terms of services, we cover everything within the Atlassian ecosystem, whether it be business related, process related, tool related. So it's a big mix of stuff at all times.

Angad Sethi:

Cool. And is it usually like you're speaking to all the team leads, and giving them advice on agile ceremonies, and pushing work through pipelines and stuff?

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah, actually, so a story of when I first moved to Brussels, because we've... So professional services started at Adaptavist in the UK, and this was maybe like seven-eight years ago, and it's expanded and myself and William were part of like the first group of consultants who were in North America. That expanded really quickly, and now that we're in EMEA, it's almost like a different entity. It's a different way of working, and a lot of leadership has moved over to North America, so there's new systems and processes and ceremonies and then all that's happening. But because of time zones there's a conflict.

So what I started to do when we got here was to reintroduce some of those habits and consistent conversations to have, to really be much more on a better planning cadence. So interacting with people who would be, say, bringing work to delivery in presale. So folks who are, who work similar to William's capacity over here in this region, and then also project managers who would be responsible for managing that work. Right? So on the equivalent of like a scrum master on an engagement or like an RTE on a big engagement. Right?

Angad Sethi:

Yep. Yep. That's awesome. Just one thing I really liked was your terminology. You used conversations over ceremonies or speaks about the agile mindset in that sense, where you're not just pushing ceremonies on teams, where you actually embody being agile. Well, I'm assuming you are from your conversation, but I guess we'll unpack that. What about you, William? What's your [crosstalk 00:06:32]

William Rojas:

I was going to say, one of the things that's interesting challenge that we face, because Adaptavist has an entire branch that does product development and there are product developers, and product managers, and product marketing, and all sorts of things like that. And they set plans and they focus, deliver and so forth, as you would expect a normal product organization to do. On the consulting side, one of the things that's very interesting is that a lot of our, like we have to answer to two bosses, right? Like our clients come in and say, "Hey, we need this," and we have to support them. In the meantime, we have a lot of internal projects, internal procedures and processes and things that we want do as a company, as a practice, but at the same time, we still need to answer to our clients.

Angad Sethi:

I see.

William Rojas:

So that's actually one of the interesting challenges that from an agile perspective, we're constantly facing having to balance out between sometimes conflicting priorities. And that is definitely something that, and although consulting teams at different levels face this challenge. Right?

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

So as Riz mentioned, we're constantly bringing in more work and like, "Okay, we need you to now adjust and re-plan to do something different, then manage." Yes. It's an ongoing problem that's just part of this part of this world kind of thing.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Okay. I see. And so if I heard that correctly, so it's, I guess you're constantly recommending agile processes, but you may not necessarily get to practice it?

William Rojas:

But more so we're both practicing for ourselves as well as trying to tell our clients to practice it or trying to adjust.

Angad Sethi:

I see, yeah.

William Rojas:

You know, a client comes in with needs and says, "Okay, now we have to re-plan or teach them how to do it, or re-accommodate their new emerging priorities as well." So we ultimately end up having to practice agile with and for our clients, as well as for ourselves. It's that constant rebalancing of having to weave in client needs into internal needs, and then the constant re-priority that may come as a result of that.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

And then we're constantly looking for like, how do we make this thing more efficient, more effective? How do we really be lean about how we do the work and so forth? That is definitely one thing that we practice. We try to practice that on a daily basis.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. And I guess that's a very, a tricky space to be... not a tricky space. It can be tricky, I guess, but adding to the trickiness is remote work. Do you guys have a lot of clients who have transitioned to remote work? And I don't know, has it, has it bought to light problems, which can be a good thing, or like what's your experience been?

William Rojas:

So that's interesting because so I've been doing consulting for over a couple decades, and traditionally, so I've done a lot of that, that travel warrior, every week you go travel to the client to do your work, you travel back and you do that again next week, and you do that month after month. In coming to Adaptavist, Adaptavist has historically always been a remote consulting company. So five years ago it was like, wow, we would go to clients saying like, "Okay, we need you to do this." And we're like, "Yeah, we can deliver that. And no, we don't need to, you know. We may come in and do a onsite visit to introduce ourselves, but we can deliver all this work remotely." So we've always had that history.

Angad Sethi:

Okay.

William Rojas:

But nonetheless, when COVID hit and everybody went remote, we definitely experienced a whole new set of companies were now suddenly having to work remotely, and having to establish new processes and practices that basically forced them to be remote. And I think we've had the fortune of in a sense, having always been-

Angad Sethi:

Yep, remote start.

William Rojas:

... S8's.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

I know whenever we bring on people into the company, into consulting particular, that's one of the things we always point out. Remote work is not the same as being in the office. It has its ups and downs. But we've always had that benefit. I think we've been able to assist some of our clients, like, This is how this is how it's done, this is how we do it." So we've been able to teach by example type of thing for some of the clients.

Angad Sethi:

There you go.

William Rojas:

Yeah.

Angad Sethi:

Awesome. That was actually going to be my next question is what's the working structure at Adaptavist and what sort of processes? I'm sure that it's a big company and therefore there'd be tools and processes particular to teams in themselves. Just from your experiences, what are some of the processes or tools you guys are using?

Rizwan Hasan:

So, in terms of planning and work management, because we started off as a remote first company, and since COVID, business is good. I'll be frank there, it's been good for us because we specialize in this market. We've had a huge hiring spurt in all these different areas, and one thing that I noticed internally, as well as problems that... I wouldn't say problems, but a trend that we're seeing with a lot of other clients is that because of this remote push, and the need for an enterprise to be able to give the teams the tools they need to do their work, there's a lot more flexibility in what they can use, which has pros and cons.

On the pro side, there's flexibility, the teams can work the way they want. On the con side, administration might be difficult, alignment might be difficult. So we're seeing a lot of that with customers and ours. So we're almost going on this journey with customers as we're scaling ourselves, and learning how to navigate this new reality of working in a hybrid environment.

William Rojas:

I think in terms of some of the tooling and so forth that we get to do. So we obviously internally we have, we're pretty, pretty much in Atlassian. Atlassian stack, that is very much how we work every day. All our work is using Atlassian tools. All our work is tracked, all our client work is tracked in JIRA, all our sales work, basically everything we do, we use JIRA and Confluence, we're really big on Confluence. We have a lot of customizations we've done to our instance over the years, things that we just have developed, and so that's internal.

I think the other aspect is often, depending on the client that comes to us and the type of work that we're doing for that client, then the types of tools that we use can pretty much run the full gamut. We have a lot of Atlassians, we do a lot of work in JIRA with our clients, like work in Confluence. Sometimes we're working on helping them scale, so we bring on some of the add-on to support some of the scaling practices within to support JIRA. We'll do a lot of JSM work. We do often DevOps work, and then we'll bring on a lot of the DevOps tool sets that you would expect to find, so things to support delivery pipelines.

So it really depends quite a bit on the client. We even do some agile transformation work. And then there, we do some a lot of custom build things, practices and so forth. And we bring in surveys and tools that we've been able to develop over the years to support that particularly. So a lot of the tools often are dictated by what the client and the specific engagement call for.

Angad Sethi:

In my personal experience recently with COVID, I find myself in a lot of meetings, we are experimenting with, with Async decision making. Have you experimented with Async decision making processes yet?

Rizwan Hasan:

I'll start by saying I hate meetings. I think most meetings are a waste of time, and I tell my team this. And I'm like, "If we don't need to meet, like we're not going to meet."

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Awesome.

Rizwan Hasan:

And I think that really comes. Yeah, awesome, for sure. Awesome.

Angad Sethi:

I love it.

Rizwan Hasan:

But it comes down to really is when you do meet, are you having the right conversation? And I think a key component being like an agile team, quote-unquote, is you have an understanding of what we all are doing collectively and what the priorities are. Which is tough to actually get. So when we talk about like asynchronous decision making, with a team that has some degree of understanding of what priorities are, what goals are, it gets easier. And you can have more low impact interactions with people.

So we use Slack a lot and we have a lot of internal bots on our Slack to be able to present information and collect feedback at asynchronous times, because there's voting features, there's places where you can comment. And I think when we talk about teams that are growing across the globe and also time zones and flexible working, that's a real thing now. There's a practical way of how to do that, that we're starting to dig into what does that look like?

Angad Sethi:

Do you find yourself in a million Slack groups?

Rizwan Hasan:

Yep.

Angad Sethi:

Yep. You do. Do you see any extra hurdles you've got to skip because of that? Because you maybe, do you find yourself hopping from conversation to conversation, whereas it would just be easier if everyone was in the same conversation? Does that happen a bit?

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah. Yeah. All the time.

Angad Sethi:

I hear you, yeah, there you go. Okay. Cool.

William Rojas:

But I would say we have a lot of impromptu. I think we do have a lot of impromptu meetings. And sometimes we may be in a Slack typing away. It says, you know what? [crosstalk 00:17:29]

Angad Sethi:

Just jump in a huddle.

William Rojas:

Into Zoom and then let's chat or Slack conversation, and then just face to face conversation, and then just address it then and there. But I think we have been looking at, it's almost like I think a balance between the time spent on the meeting, and the amount of people that need to be in the meeting, and the benefit and value that comes out of that meeting. And a daily meeting where work was people would pick up work or support from a sales perspective. And it was very, very much necessary as per part of the work coming into the consulting pipeline. But it felt very inefficient.

So that's one of the means, for example, we did away with, and it's now a completely asynchronous process, by which work comes in and it gets allocated, people pick it up, people support it, we deliver things, we track where things are and so forth. And we now use all of that is basically all done through Slack. So we did away with all the meetings around, "Hey, who can help with this?" But meantime, we have another meeting where we're trying to get people on projects. And that is very much a, we need to negotiate on that often. So that's a meeting that's still very much done.

Angad Sethi:

Yep.

William Rojas:

Everybody comes in, we all talk, we decide what we need to get done. People balance back and forth. So that trade off I think is really important to really understand what, there are meetings that are necessary, very valuable, and they should remain. And there's ones that really a Slack is a much better mechanism to be able to make those kind of decisions

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Very true. Yeah. And does it well, sorry, firstly, pardon the location change. I'm sitting right next to the router now, so hopefully the iPhone holds. What sort of a scale are we speaking about here in your Slack? The reason I ask is with larger organizations, it can be harder to scale. Therefore I'm just trying to get a gauge of what scale your Slack is at.

Rizwan Hasan:

So we just hit, we are just over the 500 mark, that'd be in terms of employees. With basically our general, which seems to be, I think, I don't want to say universal, but the standard across any organization that has Slack general as the best indicator of how many people you have logged on. So we're just about the 500 mark, which I would say is probably around mid-size, but it's definitely getting to the point where we're starting to see, it's almost a little bit too much in order to disseminate information, find their information, etc.

We're actually partners with Slack also. So we work with them pretty closely on some opportunities. [crosstalk 00:20:39] Yeah, exactly. And we're starting to talk with customers also about the same problem, about how much is too much, and when do you start to form communities around people that are delivering the same type of value. So those conversations are more aligned and there's not just a whole lot of chatter and people get confused, like when they read Slack and like, "Oh, is this the priority now? Or am I supposed to be doing this or change in process?" That communication is harder now, I think, really. And this is where a lot of folks, I think, who are moving to this remote environment are struggling with, is that alignment communication.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Very true.

William Rojas:

And it is, I would say fairly organic, like our channel proliferation. We do have, I would think even for company of our size, we're pretty loose about how channels get proliferated, who gets to create them, what they're for and so forth. But then it gives the flexibility of based upon your interests or the context of what you need to communicate on, then you can either join a channel that supports it or create a channel if necessary to support it. So it is, in that sense, pretty organic. But it is true that there are hundreds, if not thousands of Slack channels that we have, and so kind of staying like which one should you be on, is definitely one of our biggest challenges.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Well, that just blows my mind just because like 500 people on a Slack. Our whole company is 35 people and I'm pulling my hair out being in too many Slacks. So well A, that blows my mind.

William Rojas:

It does allow us, for example, to have client specific Slack channels. So anybody, if you need to talk about, if you're working on a particular account, you're working for a client, then there's a channel for that. And if you're working on another client, there's another channel. The thing I find helpful about it is that it gives you that context of if I want to communicate with so and so, if I communicate with Riz on a particular account, I will go to the account channel. If I want to talk to Riz one-on-one, I go to a one-on-one chat.

Angad Sethi:

I see, yep, the flexibility.

William Rojas:

So we do have that benefit of where to put the information. But it does mean that I have probably over a hundred channels in my roster of things that I follow, and I'm always behind.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

Well, yeah. So the next level of it is, then you begin to prioritize which channels should I really be notified about, and which ones are most important. I want to track those. And I try to keep that list to a minimum in terms of unread messages, and the stuff that I try to get to, and I'm bored and I have nothing else to do so, but yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

I've been leaving a lot of channels too. I've been just really cutting the cord with some channels. You know, I had some motivation to really help out here, but I just can't and it's just too much noise. And just got to cut the cord and be like, if it's empty, there's no conversation happening or if it's slow, then move on.

Angad Sethi:

Yep.

William Rojas:

We also have the ability to, you can get added back in. So sometimes you leave and then somebody will put you back in, like, "I need you to talk about this." But it is pretty organic. I know we do leave it up to the individual to decide how best to manage that.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah.

Angad Sethi:

That's awesome.

Rizwan Hasan:

We had a instance today, actually, where there was an old, it was basically a sales opportunity, a customer who had reached out to us for a certain ask, and we hadn't heard from them for months, like eight-nine months. And someone posted, someone who I'm pretty close with on our sales team posted, "Hey, this is kicking back up again, but I don't have the capacity." And I just left immediately as I saw that message. I was like, "I can't help out. Sorry."

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. The old so-and-so has left the group is a bit of a stab in the heart, but yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah.

Angad Sethi:

We will get over it. Just coming back to a point you mentioned, Riz, you said you used the words, alignment and communication. Both of you when consulting with clients, are those the two main themes you guys like to base your recommendations around?

Rizwan Hasan:

I'll give you a very consulting answer and say it depends.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

But when we engage with a customer, one of the toughest parts of our job is understanding if there is even alignment in the group of people that we're talking to as well, because at the scale of projects that sometimes we work with, we have like 20 to 25 people on a call. And of all of those people, they may have different motivations or objectives of what they're wanting with their engagement with us. So I would say, that's primarily what's driving what we're trying to find out, what we're trying to do with them is get some alignment between the group and ourselves, and communicating that is not always easy.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

Let's say, adding on what Riz, that also depends quite a bit on the specific engagement with that client. So in particular, if the engagement, because if an engagement is like, "Get me onto the cloud." Okay. You know, come in. Often there's much better alignment for something like that. If the engagements are more about, "Hey, help us scale agile, help us get better at how we deliver." Then the need for alignment, the need to make sure that we're all communicating correctly, we all understand, we all come to the meeting with the same objectives and so forth, is so much more critical.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

So in those kind of engagements, we're constantly realigning. Because it's not even like we had the alignment. It's like yeah. Okay. We have it, next week it's gone. We got to go back and get it again. So that keeping, making sure that everybody's marching towards the same set of objectives, defining what those objectives are, letting them evolve as appropriate and so forth, all that becomes so much more critical.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

And that's where the tools, that's where things like JIRA and then again, like how do we scale? How do we show what everybody's doing? And so forth, that's where it becomes that much more important. And in those kind of engagements, the tooling becomes essential. Not that the tooling's going to answer it, but the tooling becomes a way by which it helps us communicate, yeah. This is what we all agree we're going to do. Okay. The tool says so because that's the decision we've made.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

It's really interesting that you say cloud migration, William, like when you say, "Okay, I'm moving to cloud, we know what the alignment is," but even then, I'm finding is that, especially within the Atlassian ecosystem, because that's what we're exposed to all the time, but when we're moving data from a completely old infrastructure to something brand new, it's not going to be the same. And you have folks who are thinking that, "Oh, we're just going to be taking all this stuff from here and putting it over there." But what usually doesn't come along with it is that you're going to have to also change the way you work slightly. There's going to be changes that you're not accounting for.

And that's where the alignment conversation really is important because we work with small companies who understand, okay, moving to the cloud will be completely different. We also work with legacy organizations like financial institutions that have a lot of red tape, and process, and security concerns, and getting that alignment and understanding with them first of what this means to move to a completely different way of working, is also part of that conversation. So it's a constant push and pull with that.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah, yeah. It's really heartwarming to hear the two of you deal with the JCMA, which is the geo cloud migration system.

Rizwan Hasan:

Quite a bit, yeah.

Angad Sethi:

That's awesome, because yeah, that's something we are working on currently as well. So I'll end with a super hard question and I'll challenge you guys to not use the word depends in there. And the question is the number one piece of advice for remote teams practicing agile. Start with you, Riz.

Rizwan Hasan:

Get to know each other.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah, okay.

Rizwan Hasan:

Keep it personal. I think one of the hardest things about this new reality is making that connection with someone, and when you have that, that builds trust, and when you have trust, everything's a lot easier. So I'd say that. People really aren't... The enemy. That's not the right word, but work shouldn't be a conflict. It should be more of like a negotiation, and if you trust each other, it's a lot easier to do that.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

So yeah.

Angad Sethi:

That's awesome.

William Rojas:

It really is.

Angad Sethi:

I'm going to definitely take that back with me.

William Rojas:

Yeah. And just if I could quickly add to that. That's like looking for ways how to replace the standing around by the, having a cup of coffee. How do you replace that in a remote setting?

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

How do you still have that personal interaction that maybe there's an electronic medium in between, but there's still sort of that personal setting. I think that's one of the things you're looking for. Because yeah, it is very much about trust. And I think to that, I would also add, back to the alignment. Right? Because in some ways that strong interaction helps build and maintain the alignment, because often it's not so much that you get alignment is that you stay aligned.

So it is this constant, and having those interactions, having that trust and so forth, is what in a sense allows us to stay aligned. Because we know each other, we know how to help each other, we support each other, so we stay in alignment. So the trust and so forth are a good way to help build and maintain the alignment itself that you're looking for. That's absolutely. In remote world, you don't have the benefit of seeing each other, the whiteboard, all those things are not the same.

Angad Sethi:

Very true. Getting cup a coffee, yep.

William Rojas:

But we still need to stay in sync with what needs to get done. That's so important.

Angad Sethi:

Very true. And so would you guys want to drop any names of tools you're using to facilitate that trust between team members in a remote setting?

William Rojas:

So I would say, like I mentioned from my role, one of the things that we do is in the presales area, we support some of our larger accounts, almost as more of like a solution account manager, per se. So we come in and help make sure that the client is getting the solution that is meant to be delivered. So we work with the delivery teams, we work with the client, we sit in between.

There's one large client that we've been working on for years now, and we basically, to the point that they're moving towards some flavor of safe. That I wouldn't call it fully safe, but they do have a lot of safe practices, but they do PI planning, and so we come in and join the PI planning. That's actually one of the, like I said, how do you stay alive?

Angad Sethi:

That circle. Yeah. [crosstalk 00:33:15]

William Rojas:

You pull up your program definition, you look at what features you want to deliver in the PI, who's going to deliver that feature in the PI, and then in your readout, go back to the tool and say, "Look, this is what we've agreed to." Others can ask questions and so forth, and constantly going back to... For example, just last week, we're doing now sprint planning and saying, "Actually, okay, this feature's going to drag on another sprint. Let me go back and readjust in," this client is using the Easy Agile programs. The original plan of saying this features not going to be, not two sprints, but the three sprints instead, for example.

So that habit of getting into using the tool to communicate what we decided and what we just had to make changes to. So it becomes this, a communication vehicle, it's really important. Yeah, they use programs, they use the roadmap piece of programs to help them do their PI planning, and stay in sync with what it is that ultimately gets communicated out at the end of PI. And then during the sprints of the PI itself, and it's very helpful for them. Again, there's I think they have seven trainings, and they all use that to help stay in sync, stay aligned.

Angad Sethi:

Awesome. Awesome.

William Rojas:

One other quick thing I'll say is, I think there will be, some of where we've gone will now become status quo, become permanent. So I think that this has been as shift across the market, across the industry, across company, how people work. So the idea of remote work, the idea of using tooling to really establish communication, and help facilitate communication, all that, while it's been around, I think the big difference is now everybody, like you have no choice. Everybody has to do it.

Angad Sethi:

Has to. Yeah.

William Rojas:

And I think we've definitely seen a big shift across the entire industry because of that. That will now solidify and let's see what the next level brings. But I definitely think that we've reached a new stage of maturity and so forth pretty much globally, which is pretty cool.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah, it is. Thank you guys. I won't keep you too long. I think, has the sun set there, Riz? I can see the reflection going dark.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah. It is getting there. Yeah, for sure.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Yeah. I won't hold you guys for too long.

Rizwan Hasan:

All good.

Angad Sethi:

But thank you so much for the conversation. I honestly, I took a lot away from that. And yeah, I hope I can add you guys to my LinkedIn. I would love to be in touch still.

William Rojas:

Definitely.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah, sure.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Trying to establish a point of contact, not to add to one of your Slack channels, but yeah. Just so that we can be in conversation regarding the product and improving it.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah, sure. And we have a partner management channel. I know we've been talking to Haley a little bit.

Angad Sethi:

Awesome.

Rizwan Hasan:

She was reaching out, that's about some other stuff.

Angad Sethi:

Beautiful.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah, happy to. We engage with your product and it's in our white papers too, and we're going to put out another white paper this year where we're going to talk about Easy Agile too. So yeah. We'll stay in touch.

Angad Sethi:

Cool.

William Rojas:

I just gave you, so my LinkedIn is under a different, my LinkedIn is not with my work email. Because that way I can keep the same account place to place.

Angad Sethi:

Sounds good.

William Rojas:

Yeah. You can look me up on LinkedIn with that.

Angad Sethi:

Wicked awesome. Thanks guys.

William Rojas:

Awesome. All right.

Angad Sethi:

Have a good day.

"We spoke in detail about scaling agile, being a SAFe fellow, discipline, the traits of effective leaders and how to trust your people."

Transcript

Nick Muldoon:

Good day, folks. Thanks for joining us for another Easy Agile Podcast. This morning, I'm joined by Em Campbell-Pretty of Pretty Agile. Em is one of 22 SAFe fellows globally and she's been doing agile transformations at scale for over a decade now. She's also the author of two books, The Art of Avoiding a Train Wreck and Tribal Unity. So, all about culture and psychological safety here, and all about obviously scaling agile release trains, tips and tricks.

Nick Muldoon:

My key takeaways that I was really jazzed about, the traits of effective leaders for scaling agile transformations and being an effective organization, trust, as in trusting their people, an openness to learning and a willingness to learn, the ability to experiment and treat things as failures if they are failures, and discipline. Em and I talked a bit about discipline today as a trait of leaders. It's a really great episode and I took a lot from it, and you'll hear my takeaways at the end and what I need to go and learn after some time with Em this morning. So, let's get started. How many weeks a year are you typically on the road?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

How many weeks a year am I typically on the road? A lot, most. It would be unusual for me to spend four weeks without going somewhere. That would be unusual. I don't travel every week, but I travel most weeks, and I travel in big blocks. Right? So, I'll go and do ... Like I said, just before the lockdown, we did three weeks in Auckland, so that was in February-March.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

We went to Auckland, we had a client in Auckland, we just stayed there. So, three weeks in Auckland, came back here, and did not return to Auckland. Returned to support that client virtually over Teams and Zoom was how that one went. But yeah. Normally between running around Australia, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Manila, the US, New Zealand, yeah, not home that often, normally. This has been truly bizarre.

Nick Muldoon:

So, this is a very unusual year for someone like yourself that's flying around visiting clients all over the world.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Absolutely. Absolutely. It's been a very strange year. It's an interesting difference on energy as well. Not flying all the time I think is good for my body. I feel the difference. I also feel the difference sitting in a chair all the time. So, I was traveling a lot, but I was on my feet most days when I was working. Now if I'm working, I'm sitting a lot.

Nick Muldoon:

You're sitting down. Yeah.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, that's interesting. But I don't miss the jet lag at all. I don't miss the amount of time the travel consumes at all. In fact, it's been nice. I've had a little bit of head space. I've probably blogged more this year than I have in a few years because I've just had some head space and being able to think. But I don't get to see the world either, and all my holidays got canceled. So, nevermind work. I had trips to Europe. Four weeks from now, I was supposed to be in Canada seeing polar bears.

Nick Muldoon:

Aw.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Tell me about it!

Nick Muldoon:

I would love to see polar bears. They look so cuddly on TV. I'm not sure that that would actually be the circumstance if I was to try to approach one and give one a cuddle.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah. I don't think cuddling was involved. I was told I could bring a camera and a tripod, which means obviously I'm going to stand some distance away from this polar bear and take photos. But that will not be happening either. So, no holidays and no travel for work, and of course, being in Melbourne, not even any, let's just go to [crosstalk 00:04:15].

Nick Muldoon:

Coffee or anything like that.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Just nothing.

Nick Muldoon:

Nothing.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Nothing.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, because you've been on legit lockdown.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yep.

Nick Muldoon:

So, tell me then about the shift over the last 10 or 15 years in these scaled, agile transformations. Obviously today, like you described with this client in Auckland, everything's got to be remote. Presumably, not as effective. But I'd love to get a sense of what the evolution is from the transformations 10 years ago, banking, telcos, that sort of environment to the clients that you're working with today. Describe what it was like 10 years ago.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, 10 years ago, and it's so interesting to reflect on this now, I read Scaling Software Agility, which is a book that Dean published in 2007. Then I discovered that wasn't the latest book, so then I read Agile Software Requirements. This was 2011. I'm this crazy, angry business sponsor with this program of work I'd been sponsoring for five years that's never delivered anything, and in this cra-

Nick Muldoon:

You were the crazy, angry business sponsor?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I was the crazy [inaudible 00:05:26]. I was very angry. You would be angry too if you were me. I refer to it now as the money fire. So, basically, here's my job. Right? Go to the CFO, ask for money. Give the money to IT. IT lights a match, sets it on fire. Comes back, asks me for money. I get to go back to the CFO and say I need more money. Five years. Five years. That's all I did. Ask for money and try to explain where the other money went.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Anyway, in the strangest restructure ever, I end up the technology GM for the same group I had been the business sponsor of for the past five years. Apparently, they couldn't find anybody appropriately qualified. So, you can do it, Em. Sure. So, I'm a bit of a geek, so I read books, and I'm reading these books by Leffingwell because I'd been doing some agile ... So, I'd been doing something I'd been calling agile. Let's just go with that.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

It was interesting to me because I could see little rays of light. But it still wasn't really making anything happen, so hence the reading. These books talk about this agile release train [inaudible 00:06:46] that sounds cool. We should so do this thing. So, I set about launching this train at a Telstra in early 2012. It wasn't called SAFe, right? It was just the books and these things called an agile release train.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Now, to look back 10 years ago, it wasn't called SAFe. People weren't running around doing this. I was not actually really qualified for the job I was in. Well, I wasn't a technology leader by any stretch of the imagination, and I decide that I'm just going to launch an agile release train. So, there were rare and unusual beasts, and I'm not sure I really understood that when I went down the path of doing it.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

I'm big on the, I read it in a book, I read it in a blog, I heard it at a conference, I'll just try it. That's very much always been my mental model. So, I read it in a book and I just tried it. Then we discover that actually, literally nobody is doing this, so it becomes Australia's first agile release train and Australia's first SAFe implementation. Oh, boy, have I learned a lot since then.

Nick Muldoon:

Well, yeah. I was reflecting on that because I dug out The Art of Avoiding a Train Wreck, right? This is one of the ones that you signed for Tegan. But obviously, you've learned a ton since then because you've managed to put together a tome of tips and tricks and things to avoid as you are pursuing these transformations. As an industry, though, well, as an industry, I guess this spans many industries, but as a practice these days, are we actually getting better at these transformations? Are there companies out there today, Em, that are still taking piles of money and setting it on fire?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, I think I meet people every day who hear my story and go, "Oh, my god. You used to work here?" So, I think there's still many, many organizations that have an experience that is like the experience I had back in 2010 and what have you. So, it seems to be something that really resonates with people. I guess so many of the businesses we go into now either are not agile at all or, I guess like my world was, doing something they call agile. What we find is the something that they call agile, I wouldn't say it's not agile. But it leaves a lot to be desired.

Nick Muldoon:

They're on a journey, right?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess so because they end up having a conversation with us. So, they understand that what they're doing is not enough. They understand that what they're doing isn't getting them the results that they want. I don't know that they understand why. It's interesting to me sometimes that they look to SAFe because you asked me about how's the client base changed? One of the things that's really interesting in Australia is we get far more of the small to medium sized companies now than the big ones.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, they're companies that consider themselves agile. But what we're calling them, the startups that are no longer startups, right? These are organizations that they're generally old 10, 20 year old startups and they're scaling and they see their problem as a scaling problem. So, that's what leads them to a conversation around the scaled agile framework.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

When we look at them through a SAFe lens, we go, "Gee, you're tiny. But okay. I can see that you can have an agile release train and it won't do you any harm. In fact, it would probably help you a lot in terms of mid-range planning," because mid-range planning just seems to be nonexistent for a lot of these organizations. Prioritization. A lot of these small organizations, very knee-jerky in terms of how they prioritize, bouncing from one thing to the other.

Nick Muldoon:

Are they reacting to the market, or are they reacting to the leaders, maybe the lack of discipline in the leadership?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

You know what? They would say they're reacting to the market. I would say they've got a discipline issue.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. [crosstalk 00:11:23].

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, I read, obviously, big reader, last summer, obviously Australian summer, US winter, I read Melissa Perry's The Build Trap. Interesting book and your well respected thought leader in product management. Not a big fan of SAFe. Probably not a big fan of agile either was the takeaway I had from her book. But the thing that she does talk about that I really thought was valuable was the lunacy in chasing your competitors. So, building features because your competitors-

Nick Muldoon:

Your competitors [crosstalk 00:12:06].

Em Campbell-Pretty:

... build them, or building features to land a contract or retain a customer. So, I thought she sees all of that as lunacy, and I tend to agree. So, that was my ... I think that's quite interesting. Her perspective is you don't know if the competitor's actually having any luck with that thing that they've built. So, if you build it because they built it, you don't know. You have no idea. So, don't just build it because they've built it. It might not be doing them any favors either.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Of course, once you start just doing random stuff for this big customer or this big client, you start to lose your way as an organization. People end up with completely different versions of their products, branches that they can't integrate anymore. It's interesting. So, when I look at that, I go, "I feel like there's a discipline issue in some of these organizations at the leadership level."

Em Campbell-Pretty:

What is it we're trying to do? What is our vision? What is our mission? What is our market? What are we doing to test and learn in that market, as opposed to just get a gun, let's do everything, grab everything? Oh, my goodness. They were doing that over there. Stop this, start this, stop this. Of course, if you're stopping and starting all the time, you're not delivering anything, and that seems to be something that we see a lot with these organizations. They're not delivering.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

I'm not saying their delivery mechanism is perfect. There's challenges there too. But some part of the problem is the inability to stay a course. Pick a course and stay a course. I'm not saying don't pivot, because that's stupid too. But being more deliberate in your choices to pivot, perhaps. Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

Do you get a sense, Em, that there are leadership teams in various geographic regions that are more effective at this and more effective at that longterm planning and having that discipline and that methodical approach to delivery over an extended time period?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

I think regions and cultures and nationalities certainly play a role in the leadership, I don't know, persona, personality. I don't know that I could say when I've worked in this country or this part of the world that their leaders are better at forethought. I think some cultures lend themselves to lean and agile more than others. Hierarchical cultures are really, really challenging.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

That can be both a geographic thing, but it can also just be an industry thing, right? So, government can be very hierarchical. The banks can be very hierarchical. Some of the Asian cultures are very hierarchical. But some companies are just very hierarchical as well. So, who owns the company, who leads the company, all of that can play a big role in what's acceptable because so much of success in this scaled agile journey comes down to a leadership that is willing to trust the teams, a leadership that is willing to learn, a leadership that's willing to experiment, and a leadership that's prepared to be disciplined.

Nick Muldoon:

So, leadership with trusting the teams, willing to learn, willing to experiment, and with discipline. They're those four things that you-

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yep.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, okay. I'll make a note of those, Em. I'll come back to those. Trust, learn, experiment, and discipline. I'm interested, I guess, this year being a very interesting, a very unique year for doing remote transformation work and coaching and consulting, 10 years ago, what was the percentage of remote team members distributed teams? Now, you've basically, I think the big banks in Australia aren't even going back to the office until 2021. Atlassian is not going back to the office until 2021. Twitter, Jack Dorsey, my old CEO, said, "Work from home forever," sort of thing. What's the takeaway for this year and what do you expect for 2021 and beyond?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, look. This year has been eyeopening, and look, some things are, as I would have anticipated, some things have been different. So, obviously, we're seeing entire organizations going online. We're seeing the teams are online, the PI planning's online, everything's online. That's actually in some ways opened up opportunity. So, where we've had clients who have had the most odd setups in terms of distribution, and you can make a train work where you've got teams across two locations. But we're big fans of the entire team is in Sydney or the entire team is in India. We don't have half the team in Sydney and half the team in India.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

But organizations really struggle with that because perhaps all the testers are in India and then you want a tester on every team and now you've got a problem. How do you create a complete team and not cross the time zones? So, the opportunity becomes if I can find teams that are not physically co-located but time zone friendly, I have a little bit more option. So, I can have a train that operates between, I don't know, Sydney and India. Or I can find a four hour overlap in their day, and I can insist that that team works 100% online.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, the big thing that we'd advise against is I don't want that team hybrid. Right? I don't want three people sitting in the office in Sydney and three people sitting in their homes in India. I want everybody online. I want an even playing field, and I think we can do that now in a way that is more acceptable than before. Because the same advice I was giving, gee, back when I wrote Tribal Unity, same advice. Right?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, 2016, everybody, equal playing field. If you're going to be distributed, everyone has to be online, as opposed to some people online and some people in a room. So, that's a more acceptable answer now than it was prior to this year. So, that's good. I think that's good.

Nick Muldoon:

In 2021, then, Em, you mean this is just going to play forward. I guess there's going to be a reversion of some of these companies back to the office because they've got huge real estate and workplace infrastructure already.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah. So, look. We're seeing clients closing offices the same way that you see some of the companies in the US doing that. We're also seeing parts of Australia and New Zealand with no particular COVID impact at this point actually going back into the office, and having created that example of teams that are crossing time zones, and then going back into the office and going back to that hybrid space. So, that's interesting and [crosstalk 00:20:08].

Nick Muldoon:

So, where you're back into that environment where you might have some people working together in an office that can get a cup of coffee together and then some that are stuck still at home. I guess there's not just even regional differences, right? If you've got a team member that's got a particular health situation, they're not going to feel comfortable necessarily coming back into the office, regardless of the situation, until there's a vaccine or something.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Absolutely.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, okay.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, yeah. Look, I think it's going to be interesting. I would strongly advocate that organizations have teams that are either in person teams or online teams, and the team just either operates 100% online or the team operates 100%-

Nick Muldoon:

In the office.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

... in person and in the office, and if you have a train that has both in any train level ceremony, everybody goes to a desk and-

Nick Muldoon:

And do it online.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

... a video camera and we do it that way. I think the thing that seems to be most sticky about the physical environment and SAFe is PI planning. Nobody needs to beat. Right? That was cool. Nobody needs to beat, no one's PI planning slipped, everybody just went. They were all online. So, we'll just PI plan online. It'll be fine. We saw people use whatever infrastructure they had available to them.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. [crosstalk 00:21:30].

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, I'm sure a number of people called you folks and said, "We need a tool." But some just went, "We have Google Suite, we have Microsoft whatever it is, we have this, we have that. We're just going to make it work," and no matter what they used, they made it work and they ran the events and their events were effective and they got the outcomes. The big thing that is missing is that energy. You can't get the energy of 100, 200 people in a room from an online event. But mechanically-

Nick Muldoon:

We can achieve it.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

... we can achieve it. So, we hear everybody wants to go back to PI planning in person because of the social, because of the energy, which I think is awesome. I absolutely think that is awesome, and I can see this world in which people do a lot more work from home, work remote, whatever that looks like, and then the PI planning events are the things that we do to bring ourselves together and reconnect on that eight, 10, 12 week basis. That's my feeling. Could be wrong.

Nick Muldoon:

I guess I'll be really interested to see how it plays out, and I think we should return to this conversation in 12 months, Em.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah. Oh, no.

Nick Muldoon:

I'm just thinking, what's going through my mind is one of our customers in New York, financial services company, and for one of their arts, it was 150,000 US exercised to bring their people together once a quarter.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah. Wow.

Nick Muldoon:

I'm now going, I'm like, "Okay, yes, they're doing it digitally now." That's fine. They're going to miss out on things. But if they lose the budget, do they have to fight to get the budget back? Or does the budget sit there? There's these other unknown ramifications of this shift over the course of 2020 that we're yet to see play out, I guess.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

I think you're right, and I think it would be particularly interesting for the trains that have been launched remotely. So, if the train has been launched remotely, do you ev-

Nick Muldoon:

So, not existing trains that have been working together for six to 12, 18 months. But you want to get a brand new train started. Have you done that remotely this year with some of your clients?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Oh, we're in the process of doing it now.

Nick Muldoon:

Cool. Tell me.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

We had one, though, literally just before the lockdown. So, they did their first PI planning face to face and then immediately moved to remote working and, yeah, now working on remotely launching a train. For us, we have a playbook. It's a bunch of workshops. It's a bunch of classes. We just use online collaboration tools. We've found things that replicate the sort of tools that we would have in a physical room, and the joy of being able to read people's Post-it notes, right? This has been the absolute highlight for me, the joy of being able to read people's Post-it notes.

Nick Muldoon:

No more hieroglyphics.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah. Absolutely.

Nick Muldoon:

What is that that you wrote, Sally? Yeah.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Everyone can say everything at once, right? So, you think about the classroom and the workshop where there's a group of people huddled around Post-its and a flip chart paper and they're still huddled in a way in their virtual huddle, but everybody can read, right? It's not that I'm not close enough, I can't read, I can't read your handwriting. There's this great equalizer is the online world. So, I think that's great. I think the challenge for the trains launched remotely is going to be do you ever get the face to face experience?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Because if I go back over the years, one of the things we know is your first PI planning event sets the standard. So, people get this imprint in their heads of what is possible. For example, if you skip something in your first PI planning event, you just decide to, I don't know, skip the confidence vote or something weird like that, you don't do the roam of the risks or you just skip something, you never do it because you're successful without it.

Nick Muldoon:

It never gets picked up. Yeah, okay.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

You're successful without it. So, every compromise you make, and you make a series of compromises, and then you're successful despite those compromises, and that becomes a false positive feasibility. It tells you, yes, I was right. I was right.

Nick Muldoon:

I don't need to do that.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

I didn't need to do those things because I was awesomely successful and I didn't do these things. So, it's the learning [crosstalk 00:26:15]-

Nick Muldoon:

That's confirmation bias, is it?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah, that's it. That's the one. Confirmation bias. That's exactly it. Yep. Yeah, and I think there's going to be a bunch of confirmation bias in these remotely launched trains, and unless they're inside organizations where there's enough knowledge of SAFe and the physical PI planning to know that there's going to be value in bringing them together, but I can see that being a real challenge. I think trains that are launched online may never go into a physical PI planning event because of that confirmation bias.

Nick Muldoon:

All right.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

That makes me really sad.

Nick Muldoon:

I want to come back to something you said before about the leaders, and you mentioned the trust, the openness to learning and experimentation, and the discipline. I was going back over your SAFe Global 2018 talk about the seven traits of highly effective servant leaders.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yep.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yep.

Nick Muldoon:

I guess I had some questions about this, and obviously, these are four of the traits. What are the other three traits that I'm missing? Then I've got a followup question about some of the actual things that you talked about that you picked up in your trip.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

[inaudible 00:27:29] one of those four on the list I had in 2018.

Nick Muldoon:

I'll quiz you on it.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

How awkward. So, in 2018, the answer was people first, a respect for people, that sort of lens, lean thinking, manager, teacher, learner. So, we had that one. Yeah. Learner. [inaudible 00:28:00] crazy. What else did I have? [inaudible 00:28:10].

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. Okay. I wanted to talk about that one, actually. I made a note about that. What is that, and are there examples of that in the West?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

A lot of people talk about true north.

Nick Muldoon:

[inaudible 00:28:28]. True north.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah. True north. The translation I got, which I got from Mr. [inaudible 00:28:39], who partnered with Katie Anderson for the lean study tour I did in, I don't know, '18, '17, '18, 2018, I think, so the translation he gave was direction and management sort of things. So, it's mission, right? It's strategic mission. It's that sort of thing.

Nick Muldoon:

So, just a sidebar here for anyone that hasn't seen Em's talk on this, there's a woman by the name of Katie Anderson. She runs an annual, I think, I guess not this year, but she runs an annual-

Em Campbell-Pretty:

No, not this year. She did not go this year.

Nick Muldoon:

... not this year, runs an annual lean, Kanban, kaizen study tour to Japan and visits ... Who did you visit, Em? You visited with Katie. How many were in the crew that you went over there with?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, I think it was a group of about 20 from memory. Katie lived in Japan for two years and then went back to the US. She lives in San Francisco, I think. While she was there, she really liked the idea of putting together these lean study tours. She was already a lean practitioner more in the healthcare side of things. So, she got the opportunity to ... We actually were on a test run tour.

Nick Muldoon:

Oh, cool.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, this was her experiment. She had a relationship with Ohio State University and they brought some people to the table and she brought some people to the table and they made it happen. She also had an existing relationship with Mr. [inaudible 00:30:24], who was John [inaudible 00:30:26] first manager at Toyota. So, he's a 40 year Toyota veteran.

Nick Muldoon:

Veteran.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

He came with us for the week. So, we of course went to Toyota, but we went to a bunch of Toyota suppliers as well. Isuzu, [inaudible 00:30:43]. Then we also went to Japan Post, which was fascinating. We went to a city which name escapes me right now, but they called it 5S City because all the companies in that city practice the 5S, the manufacturing 5S.

Nick Muldoon:

Tell me about it. It's not coming to mind. I don't feel comfortable or familiar.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

You don't feel good about 5S?

Nick Muldoon:

No.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

No. That's not good. So, how would I ... The 5S is five Japanese words, which I'm going to go ... Yeah. My Japanese, nothing. But it's about standardized work. So, for example, when you go into the 5S factories, you'll see the floors marked up where you need to stand to do a particular job.

Nick Muldoon:

[crosstalk 00:31:41] This is what Paul Aikas picked up for his-

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Oh, no.

Nick Muldoon:

I feel like I've seen Paul Aikas' videos of their manufacturing in the US that everything's marked up.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

Okay.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Probably. That would be my guess. We should ask Teddy.

Nick Muldoon:

We can ask Paul, and we can ask all these people. There's time.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Well, yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

Okay.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Okay.

Nick Muldoon:

So, that lean tour, the Japan study tour, that was a super effective and motivating thing for you?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah. For me, it was very reinforcing. So, I had I guess my own lens on what lean leadership meant, and I found that particular tour to be very reinforcing around the value set that I believe is part of that. Katie [inaudible 00:32:43] created [inaudible 00:32:44] that is designed to show you that. So, she's often very clear that says this is not Japan, right? This is not a reorganization into Japan. This is not every leader in Japan.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

This is, I've hand picked a series of lean leaders to show you it being practiced. But it was certainly very reinforcing for me. So, very similar messages I picked up in terms of how I like to head, how I coach others to lead was built into the messages that she delivered. So, it was very cool. It was very cool. Some of those leaders, just so inspiring, particular kaizen. I think the thing that just really hits you in the face as you're talking to these folks is kaizen, this drive to get better.

Nick Muldoon:

All the time.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

All the time. Absolutely. It's these folks looking for, they're looking for the one second, right?

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

The one second improvements. There's a video that floats around. Have you seen the Formula 1 video-

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

... where they do, yeah, the changeover in 63 and it takes them over a minute and they do the changeover in 90-something in Melbourne and it takes them six seconds or whatever it is. It's like that, right? It's that how do I find one more second, half a second? They're just so driven. If I can remove a step that someone has to take, can I move something closer to somebody?

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. There was some comment in the presentation that you gave. There was some comment about if I have to take another five steps, that's an extra 10 seconds. Then that's an extra 10 seconds every time I do this activity every day, and that all adds up. So, how do we shave these seconds off and be more effective and deliberate about how we do this?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

That was just huge, right? I called it kaizen crazy in the presentation. I'm just so, so driven to improve, and just tiny, small improvements every day.

Nick Muldoon:

So, one of the other practices that I didn't grok out of that talk was about the Bus Stop. What was the Bus Stop about?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Was that in that talk? Really?

Nick Muldoon:

I'm forcing you to stretch your mind [crosstalk 00:34:57].

Em Campbell-Pretty:

You are. You are. You are. You are quite right. It really was [inaudible 00:35:01]. Okay. Oh, you're awful.

Nick Muldoon:

Yes.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yes. Yes, you are. Okay. So, effective leaders are human was the tagline on that one. It was really about leaders being down to Earth and being one with the teams. So, things I saw in Japan, this factory run by a woman, [inaudible 00:35:42], I think it was, so very unusual. Not a lot of women leaders in Japan. Her husband took her name because [inaudible 00:35:52]. It's a really interesting character.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

But her company has a bunch of morning rituals. You always say good morning and thank you and how they talk every day and everybody talks and everyone interacts. Then one of the other places we went to, they all had their uniforms they wore in the factory. But everybody wore the uniform, right? The CEO, the office workers, and everybody wore the uniform. Everyone was one.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Then I was thinking about my experience leading teams, and a lifetime ago, I was working with a team that decided to enter a corporate competition. This competition was about showing your colors and showing the corporate values, which were things like better together and courage, and then [inaudible 00:36:49] a rainbow thing. So, this team decides what they're going to do, is it an address up in the rainbow colors, and they're going to be better together and show their courage and they're going to do the Macarena and they're going to video it and that's going to be how they're going to win this competition.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

I did not participate in this Macarena because someone has to take photos and stuff, right? How else are they going to enter the competition? So, had to do my bit. Anyway, we also had this ritual, which was about teams bringing challenges to leadership to resolve, and they did at the end of every spring. So, they do this Macarena and they film it and they enter the competition and at the end of the spring, they bring their challenges to leadership.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Their challenge is Em did not do the Macarena. You are our leader, you did not do the Macarena. We are feeling very challenged by that, and we're bringing this to you to resolve. So, I went and spoke to the team that raised and said, "Look. I got to tell you. I don't know the Macarena. So, sorry." I still remember this so clearly. One of the guys said to me, "I read this blog about the importance of leaders being vulnerable." You know who wrote that blog post, don't you?

Nick Muldoon:

Oh, Em. Oh. You have it.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, we negotiated. I said, "Look. I think I can manage the Bus Stop." For those not from Australia, we grow up doing this in high school dances. In my part of the world, anyway. So, I grabbed my leadership team and we did do the Bus Stop and it was part of proving that we too were the same as everybody else and doing our bit and responding to the team's feedback. So, yes. That is where the Bus Stop fits in. Thanks so much for that, Nick.

Nick Muldoon:

Okay. No, I appreciate that. Now, I'm glad that I got that context. I try and do similar things. Typically, it's a karaoke or something, or that we haven't done that in a while. Yeah, okay. So, I guess the thrust of that talk was really about to leaders to serve, and it was all about being in service of. It sounds like what you took from the Japan study tour was these leaders there were very much in service of their people.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Absolutely.

Nick Muldoon:

Do you see that as a trait that is prevalent in the best performing companies that you deal with, and how likely are they over a five, 10 year horizon, whatever that happens to be, to outperform their competitors or to be more successful in their market? Or I guess however they define success?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

I certainly see a correlation between leaders that like to serve and/or choose to serve and success with scaled agile, and business, because I guess we have seen over, it's close to 10 years, is those who practice together, your framework with discipline get results, and they get significant results. They improve their ability to deliver products and services, their cost base goes down, their quality goes up, their people are happier, their attrition goes down. We see it every single time.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

What we also see is when the leaders don't walk the talk, when the leaders are paying lip service to the transformation, it doesn't stick. They don't get the results. People don't find it a better place to work. People aren't bought into the change. So, there is definitely a correlation there. You can get pockets of wonderfulness inside an organization.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

We often observe that the organization that's transformation is as successful is the most bought in leader. Most senior bought in leader. So, if you're the leader of a train and you show the right behaviors, your train will be really great.

Nick Muldoon:

Successful.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

But that means nothing for the broader organization, solution train, the business unit, what have you. You see this thing that goes from the leader. If the leader's showing the right behaviors, you get within that space, you get the behaviors, you get the change, you get the results. But leaders who say one thing and do another, people don't buy it, right?

Nick Muldoon:

I guess this is true of any organizational change, isn't it?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

You hit the boundaries of your pocket, as you said, within the organization and then you meet the real world, the rest of the organization. People, maybe they don't have enough energy or they don't feel that they can influence and change that, and so they just live within their bubble because they don't feel that they can exert the pressure outside of that.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah. Look. I've certainly, I've seen successful bubble influence organizations. Successful bubbles can become interesting. Chip and Dan Heath's book, which one was it, Switch.

Nick Muldoon:

Oh, yeah. Switch. Yeah.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

[inaudible 00:42:02]. Shine a light on bright spot or something like that. So, bright spots inspire, and if you can create a bubble in an organization that outperforms the rest of the organization, or even if it performs better than it has previously, then everybody looks. Right? How did the organization that goes from poor delivery to great deliveries is what is going on here? That inspires others to get interested. One of the really interesting things we've seen in Australia, we can trace pretty much every SAFe implementation in Australia back to the one at Telstra.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, right. They all spun off from that, from the people that were part of it.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Well, no. People who came and saw it. People who were inspired by it.

Nick Muldoon:

They're not necessarily directly involved in it.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

No. People came and got inspired by it, and then they went, did their thing, and then they inspired someone else. I haven't tried to do it recently, but there was a point in time we just could web together all of them because we could count them when we could see them. But we can web together most of them still. It says you saw someone who saw someone who saw someone who actually was someone who went to visit us at Telstra back in 2012, 2013 and got inspired.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, that bright spot can be really, really powerful, and that's what it takes, right? You get to add a little bit of noise, a little bit of difference, and people start to ask what's going on. I wouldn't say it's foolproof. I think it still requires, so someone's got to come, they've got to see, and then they've got to have the courage to do it for their part of the organization.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

That's the hard bit, right? I can come, I can see, I can get inspired. But am I prepared to put myself out there? There's a lot to be said for leaders who are prepared to take risks. That was one of the-

Nick Muldoon:

This was your lesson about the Bus Stop, right? You have to put yourself out there and be vulnerable.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. This was actually, I was thinking, was the thing I was talking about at last year's SAFe Summit was be safe or be SAFe.

Nick Muldoon:

Be safe or be SAFe. Tell me about that.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, be safe, don't take a risk, or be SAFe, as in the scaled agile framework, and take that leap of faith. It comes back to, we started talking today about when I did this at Telstra, I didn't really understand that this wasn't a normal everyday, this is what everybody did sort of thing. It was a very new thing. So, I took a risk from a perspective that I was a business leader in a technology space and I really felt I had nothing to lose.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, I look back and that and go, "What on Earth possessed me?" And I go, "Well, I'm this business person leading this technology team. I wasn't supposed to succeed anyway."

Nick Muldoon:

Put it all on the line, right?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

I found out later they actually had a plan for when I did not succeed. I was supposed to fail.

Nick Muldoon:

Wait. How much waste is that? Why did they plan for something before it was ... Okay.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Organizational policies. What can I tell you? Anyway, I did not fail. I did succeed, and because I took some crazy, calculated risks, and I've seen it time and time again, right? So many of these leaders in these companies that make this change are taking a leap of faith. I'm always saying I can't tell you exactly what's going to happen. I don't know whether you're going to get 10% cost out or 50% cost out. I don't know if your people are going to be 10% happier or 50% happier. I don't know that.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

What I do know is if you listen to what we're telling you and you follow the guidance and you behave in line with those lean and agile values, you will get results. You'll get results every single time. But you've got to be brave enough to buy in and take it on holistically and not do this thing where you manage to customize your way out of actually doing the thing-

Nick Muldoon:

Doing anything.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

... that you wanted to do.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. Okay. Em, this was awesome. Before we finish up, I want to take two minutes. You've mentioned books a lot today and you reminded me of this quote, Verne Harnish, "Those who read and don't are only marginally better off than those who can't." So, today so far, you've mentioned Chip and Dan Heath with Switch, you've mentioned the Leffingwell series from the late noughties. There might have been a few others. But tell me, what are you reading today? You've been in lockdown. What are the two or three top books that you've read since you've been in lockdown in Melbourne?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Oh, my goodness. It's very awkward. Every time someone asks me, "What did you just read?" I go, "I don't know."

Nick Muldoon:

I don't think I remember.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Can't remember. It's terrible. What am I reading? I need to open my Kindle. I don't know what I'm reading. Geoffrey Moore, Zone to Win.

Nick Muldoon:

Zone to Win.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Zone to Win. I think that's what it's called. It's a newer book. I know this year, because obviously, I've read The Build Trap this year-

Nick Muldoon:

Yep. Melissa Perry. You mentioned that one. Yeah.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yep. I've read the Project to Product, Mik Kersten.

Nick Muldoon:

What was that one, Project to Product?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah. Project to Product, Mik Kersten. One of the IT Revolution press books. So, released just over a year ago. Very tied up in the SAFe 5.0 [crosstalk 00:48:21]. The other book tied up in the SAFe 5.0 release is John Kotter's Accelerate. So, I picked that back up. I read it a number of years ago when it first came out. But I like to revisit stuff when SAFe puts it front and center. Seems to make some sense to do that at that point in time.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, okay. It's interesting that, thinking about Verne Harnish, the scaling up framework, no relation to-

Em Campbell-Pretty:

No.

Nick Muldoon:

... scaled agile, for anyone that's not familiar. But so much of the scaling up framework about scaling businesses, they draw on so much content from existing offers, existing tomes, points of reference and experience, and it's super valuable, and I guess SAFe is no different, right? It draws on this wisdom of the collective wisdom.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Absolutely. Absolutely. [inaudible 00:49:14] It was very fun to say in the early days, we stand on the shoulders of giants, a quote from somebody else whose name escapes me.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, okay. Well, Em, look. I wanted to thank you so much for your time this morning. This has been fantastic.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

No worries. It's great to catch up with you.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. I guess my takeaways from this, I like the be safe or be SAFe, like either be safe and don't take any risks, or be SAFe and actually put yourself out there and step into scaled agile. I definitely have to go and do a bit of research on the five S's as well and learn a bit more about that. But thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

No worries, Nick. Great to see you.