Tammy Gretz & Wendy Jacobs - Agile2018

Tammy Gretz and Wendy Jacobs discuss their talk "From Self
Obsession to Self Selection: A Scaled Org's Journey to Value
Reorganization" at Agile2018.


 


Transcript


Tammy Gretz Wendy Jacobs ‑ Agile2018


 


Bob Payne:  "The Agile toolkit."


[music]


Bob:  Hi. I'm your host, Bob Payne. I'm
here with Tammy Gretz of [inaudible 0:25] ...


[laughter]


Bob:  ...and Wendy Jacobs. We've chatted a
bit before this, but this is the first time you guys are doing a
podcast, I think.


Wendy Jacobs:  A live podcast, yes.


Bob:  A live podcast.


Wendy:  Correct.


Bob:  This is recorded.


[laughter]


Bob:  You still have had to come.


Wendy:  This is the first live or recorded
podcast for me. There you go.


[laughter]


Bob:  You are doing a talk and it's related
to team self‑selection, From Self‑Obsession to Self‑Selection.
What's that all about? How do you two work together? What's your
back story? What's the talk?


Wendy:  I work at AEP, American Electric
Power ‑‑ this is Wendy ‑‑ and Tammy and I work together there.
She is a Scrum master on one of the teams working through our
Agile partner, Cardinal Solutions. We started working together
when she joined the team that we actually talk about.


Tammy Gretz:  I was coming from it from a
prospective of, it was a new team and I was there to teach them
Scrum. They had never done it before.


Bob:  Is this new to the whole organization
or just to this team?


Wendy:  We are in a multi‑year Agile
transformation. The self‑selection and scaling, which is another
aspect of the talk that we're doing, is new to the organization.
This was the experiment.


Bob:  How long have you been running Agile
teams before you hit scaling and self‑selection?


Tammy:  Before I came to AEP, I had been
working about two or three years in an Agile environment. The AEP
transformation, I believe, has been between seven and nine years.


Bob:  Usually teams don't get to
self‑selection until they've been doing it for a while.


Wendy:  The group of teams that we're
talking about, one of them was new when Tammy came in, newly into
Scrum. The other two had been Scrum teams for a couple of years.


Bob:  What was the self‑obsession portion
of the program?


Tammy:  [laughs] My team specifically was
new to Scrum. The intention wasn't to go to scaling or do this
whole self‑selection when I first started. It was teach this team
Scrum and figure out how to get them working with the other two
teams.


We quickly realized that there were a lot of moving parts that
need to have some kind of an organization or some framework to
work with.


Wendy:  The self‑obsession aspect is just
human. We're worried about ourselves. When we're talking about
having to all come together and do self‑selection event that
involves trying to figure out how to deliver the most value to
the company, you have to shed that self‑obsession, that
selfishness and become selfless, because you have to see, where
can I help most?


This was a journey to take the individuals into teaming, into the
ability to do self‑selection. That's where the...


Bob:  Also, there's team identity, which
you blow up with self‑selection. What is the event that caused
you to say, "Hey, we need to kind of shake the snow globe here?"
[laughs]


Wendy:  We took a scaling class with a very
experiment‑tolerant manager, we like to call her Andrea.


Bob:  Because that's her name.


[laughter]


Wendy:  Protecting the innocent, whatever.
Anyway, there was a kernel of it in there. One of the gentlemen
on my team, he had a white paper on self‑selection for teams. We
had begun talking about it. He sent her the white paper. We like
to call him Greg. He sent her the white paper to just wet the
whistle.


Get the juices flowing about what does it really mean to do that,
and she loved it. She loved the empowerment to the teams to be
able...


Bob:  It wasn't by Amber King was it?


Wendy:  I don't recall. We can check.


[laughter]


Bob:  That would be interesting. She's a
good friend of ours and she did a white paper on self‑selection
at Cap One. It's possible.


Wendy:  Very well possible. That was the
kernel of it. She got a hold of that and really embraced it, and
thought, "This could..." We were in a scenario where we wanted to
make sure that the teams were formed in a way that delivered the
value best. We were focusing on the value delivery.


She worked with her business partners to define what those value
streams were.


Instead of just saying, "OK, you're on this team, and you're on
this team, and you're on this team," she decided to let the teams
decide, "Where does your value heart sing? Where do you want to
put your focus?" thus lead us to self‑selection event.


Bob:  How many people?


Tammy:  Thirty‑four.


Bob:  How many teams did you end up with?


Wendy:  Six squads. That was a very
critical word in this. We went from three teams to six squads
because we're all part of one team. In a scaling event, you're
really part of one team. She was really very specific about
wanting to call these squads up to the general team.


Bob:  How did it go? I'm sure some people
were the Cookie Monster characters for the self‑selection. Some
people...


Wendy:  People were people. [laughs]


Bob:  ...wanted to be told where go. "Tell
me where to sit." [laughs]


Wendy:  Exactly. It's all human. Think
about being here at this conference. This is something we're
going to talk about tomorrow, is that, how do you even select
what session to go to? How do you figure out where you're going
to sit? There's all sorts of reasons in your head.


Tammy:  Nobody has the same two reasons.
People pick things for weird reasons. They pick them for very
specific, concrete reasons. You can't plan for that.


Wendy:  The event went well. It was a
two‑day event. The self‑selection took place the first day. We
had some teaming main events on the second day to try to make
sure that they were ready to go. Team agreements and let's talk
about the definitions.


During the actual self‑selection event, Andrea took care to
really plan this. We helped her. We met for a couple months to
plan this event. She made it fun. She made it seasonal. [laughs]
It was right near Valentine's Day. There was a Valentine's Day
theme to the whole thing. I was very impressed with what she came
up with. Just the creativity that came out of her.


Tammy:  For me, I was more of a participant
during this. I was embedded in the team and Wendy was a coach
with the team. She was working with the manager. It was very
interesting to experience what maybe my other coworkers on the
team, my other teammates, what they were experiencing, even
though I knew what was coming.


I still had that knee‑jerk reaction to be a human, and be like,
"Oh, you want me to...? Oh, I got to do this? I don't care. Just
put me wherever." [laughs]


Bob:  Did you end up with any value streams
that were starved of folks and then have to re‑negotiate?


Wendy:  Interesting you ask.


[laughter]


Wendy:  Have you seen our talk? No.


[laughter]


Bob:  I've seen self‑selection events.


Wendy:  That was actually the exciting
moment. One of the exciting moments of this experience is that
there were five total iterations to get to our final teams. It
was after iteration four, and we had a starved squad.


There wasn't anyone on one of the value streams. The managers
stood up and said, "Hey, how are we going to deliver this? How
are we going to deliver this value?" It was there that the Scrum
value, courage, popped up its head.


A couple of people were like, "We want that. We can take that
on," and got up from where their friends were, where they felt
comfortable, walked over that table and planted themselves, and
said, "We got it." It was awesome.


Bob:  Was it just Andrea?


Wendy:  Yeah. [laughs]


Bob:  Was she the advocate for each of
them, or were there value stream owners that were...?


Wendy:  The product owners were there and
they come from the business. They were participating in this.
Their management was there, too, watching, helping, and answering
any questions if we had any, but Andrea was the manager of most
of the people in the room.


The answer is she advocated for all the teams and wanted to make
sure that we came out with something that would benefit the
company overall.


Bob:  Is this a one‑time event or are you
periodically revisiting as the demands on value streams change?


[laughter]


Tammy:  Actually, part of the agreement was
that if they didn't like where they were, they had a chance to do
it again in six months. We're right about at six months right
now. They have come back and said, "Maybe we didn't think about
this in the right way, necessarily, and we were still
self‑obsessed a little bit."


Now they're starting to see where, "Oh, maybe it might have been
better if these two people were flopped," or, "This value stream
might be a little better tweaked." They're learning from it.
We're hopeful that they'll get to do that again here shortly.
Interestingly enough, we have another group here that is going to
be talking about another way that they did it.


I've moved on to a different team and I've just completed another
self‑selection there [laughs] with that team because they were
growing. They were a smaller team and they realized that they
needed to hire more. They hired four more people, which made them
a massive team. We had to have discussions around the same kind
of thing.


We learned a lot from the first one, [laughs] applied it to this
one. This one went really smoothly. It didn't take quite as long,
but it was...


Wendy:  The whole company's very supportive
of continuous improvement. That's part of our culture, we're a
continuous improvement company. I've helped with another
self‑selection event not long after the one we did in February,
and it was different. We've done it a couple different ways and
we're learning each time from it.


Tammy has the benefit in her current team to apply all the
learnings we had and munge some of that together so they would
have a very smooth event.


Bob:  One of the things that I've seen in
some places, as the business demands change, certain value
streams will become higher in priority, where more work needs to
flow through them. Have you guys experienced that yet or is that
a future event?


Tammy:  We might be going through it pretty
soon. [laughs]


Wendy:  With the current team you're on?


Tammy:  Yeah.


Wendy:  The current team that she's on,
they are going to be sized a little differently based on the
amount of stuff that's going to come through them. It is possible
that that team may split again, the larger team. We're really
looking at what makes the most sense. We're doing these
experiments to try to understand what's working, what's not
working, how can we tweak it?


The managers are just very open and very wanting to try these
things to make it the best place that they can.


Bob:  One of the things that I saw one
client do is quarterly, when they would do the equivalent of a
cross‑program planning event, would then allow people to swap
chairs, or they would shuffle demand, and say, "We need more
folks over here, who would like to come join?" Then people would
come, and they were like, "Oh shoot, we're too short over here."


I don't know if they did five rounds. I don't remember exactly,
but some number of...


Tammy:  It's funny you said shuffle chairs,
because that was almost more important than which team they were
on, is where they were going to sit.


Bob:  Oh yeah?


[laughter]


Wendy:  "I want the window. No, I want the
window." They're, again, human.


[laughter]


Tammy:  It's all about the humans. It
wasn't about the work. It was...


Bob:  The soft stuff is the hard stuff.
[laughs] Agile's easy, people are hard.


[laughter]


Tammy:  It's especially the different
personality types. Even if we go really high‑level, introvert,
extrovert, some of these things could be very hard for
introverts, I think. You're speaking up and saying, "I want to go
there." There's that shyness that they don't want to ruffle
any...make any waves or do anything like that.


All of these events, we've been very purposeful in thinking about
that, making sure that there's no one really uncomfortable to a
point where...


Bob:  They could be uncomfortable, but not
really.


Wendy:  Self‑selection is uncomfortable.


[laughter]


Wendy:  We don't want to push them so far.


Bob:  I wouldn't pick me.


[laughter]


Tammy:  You should always pick yourself.


[laughter]


Bob:  That's really exciting. Hoping that
you'll get a good run of folks at that talk. It'll be very
interesting. What else has been exciting about the conference? I
know it's only day two. I believe you were at the Women in Agile.
Did you do any of the camp before that, or just the Women in
Agile?


Wendy:  I actually didn't know about the
camp before. Now that I know that they happen...


[laughter]


Bob:  They don't always happen.


Wendy:  I know there's one happening, I
believe, in Chicago in October or something like that, I was
told. Now I'll be looking into this because it sounds like an
interesting place to share ideas, get some new thoughts about how
to do some things. Improve the toolkit.


Tammy:  I'm really enjoying the Audacious
Salons.


Bob:  Good.


Tammy:  Really enjoying them, a lot.
[laughs]


Bob:  Were you there yesterday?


Tammy:  I was there for the leadership one,
Agile Leadership. Today is The Next Big Idea.


Wendy:  We did hear the afternoon session
was quite interesting. Quite charged.


Tammy:  I missed that. [laughs]


Bob:  George said they went hours over the
slot. I know Lisa and George very well. George has been on the
podcast many, many times.


[laughter]


Wendy:  We are in good company.


[laughter]


Bob:  We have the "Tips and Advice" series
on Agile Toolkit Podcast. How was the Women in Agile event? I
know you met Amanda there, my colleague.


Wendy:  Yes.


Bob:  Big Pete was there. I don't know if
you met him?


Wendy:  I did not meet Pete. Did you meet
Pete?


Tammy:  No.


Wendy:  Women in Agile, I enjoyed it. I
like meeting people. I like meeting all kinds...


Bob:  You seem very shy.


[laughter]


Wendy:  Believe it or not. [laughs]


Tammy:  She's the connector. She knows
people, and she's like, "Hey, you guys should know each other."
[laughs]


Wendy:  I do. I make sure everybody meets
each other. I liked hearing people's stories about where they
were in their Agile journey. The table I was at was a table that
had no question to answer. We got to make up our own question
that we wanted to answer, which was nice.


We had a couple of folks at the table that weren't very far in
their journey at all, and wanted to understand, what's the
benefit of Agile over Waterfall? Those types of things. It was
really very enjoyable to hear their perspectives on where they
are and to try to share where I've been and where my enterprise
is. It was a good event.


I really loved hearing the new voices. There were two speakers
that came in. They were reasonably new speakers. They had such
wonderful stories.


Tammy:  They were really great. The two new
speakers, the new voices, that was a great element to that
conference piece of it, is having these new people get up and
speak.


Bob:  Do you remember who they were? I
wasn't there. No?


Tammy:  I talked to them last night.


Bob:  [laughs] They're super new voices.
Real super nice people as well. [laughs]


Wendy:  Their story was really great.


Tammy:  Their stories were amazing. The
things that they went through and now the places they've been,
it's inspiring. I wish them all the best of luck and hope to get
to do some of the...they've gone internationally and spoken, and
that just sounds really cool and really fun. Just listening to
how they did that was neat.


Bob:  There's a decent conference ‑‑ Agile
India is quite good. The European conferences, I've not actually
gone to those either. I'm looking forward to going
internationally.


Wendy:  Maybe we should all go.


Tammy:  Yeah, let's go.


[laughter]


Tammy:  What time does the plane leave?
[laughs]


Wendy:  Let's do it.


Bob:  It's a red‑eye.


[laughter]


Tammy:  That's what she's on tomorrow.


Wendy:  Yeah, I've got to take a red‑eye
back.


Bob:  I'm sorry to hear that. I can't do
it. I'm staying till Friday morning.


Tammy:  I'm staying the weekend. I wanted
to get a couple extra days in just to enjoy the beautiful
weather.


Bob:  The farmer's markets are actually
fantastic if you like that sort of thing.


Tammy:  Absolutely.


Bob:  We had the Scrum gathering out here.
I had my favorite breakfast ever, which was a sea urchin shell
that had been cleaned out with micro‑greens, tuna pokÈ, more
micro‑greens, and then the sea urchin laid out.


Tammy:  That is a very specific breakfast.


Bob:  Yeah.


[laughter]


Tammy:  It's not waffles.


Bob:  It's not waffles. I had an iced
coffee with it so that made it breakfast.


Tammy:  She wants waffles.


Wendy:  I'm obsessed with waffles right
now.


Tammy:  She is, yes.


Bob:  I don't know that they make sea
urchin waffles, but they might someplace.


Wendy:  I'm not sure that they should.


[laughter]


Wendy:  Just saying.


Bob:  They should.


Wendy:  You do?


Bob:  Maybe a keto egg waffle with some sea
urchin on would be good. What else are you looking forward to at
this conference?


Wendy:  Speaking. [laughs]


[crosstalk]


Wendy:  Actually getting through that.
[laughs] Yes, the speaking would be a number high on the list.
Honestly, I'm just looking for new ideas. I'm focusing more into
the product space, the talks that are going on. I'm looking for
some of those new things that I can take back.


In my role, I am the product owner coach and I focus on the
business side of things. I look for new tools I can use with them
to help them understand why to do some of the things that we do,
or just ways that they can do it better.


Bob:  The product discovery space, it takes
almost a completely different tool set. The mechanics are
relatively straightforward, but it is the divergent thinking. How
do we winnow down these many ideas? How do we get it into that
convergent process? Agile is a delivery process and it's a
convergent one.


I love that interplay of when you can get it going. A little bit
of experimentation, divergent thinking. Let's build it, test it.
Let's get some data out. Let's have that drive our next set off
experiments or experiences. I'm assuming you've looked at
Business Model Canvas and stuff.


Wendy:  Yep. [laughs]


Tammy:  Yep.


Bob:  Impact mapping.


Wendy:  Yep.


[laughter]


Tammy:  It's all good. When I approach the
coaching of product owners, I don't just dump, "Here. Here's all
the tools. Try all of this at once." I layer it in, where, "Hey,
I'm having a real problem with trying to figure out how to
prioritize. Hey, I'm having a real problem deciding what should
be our far‑afield thing? Where should we be heading towards? How
do I lay it out for my stakeholders?"


Things that people are probably listening to this and saying,
"Well, duh." When you're new you don't know about this stuff. You
can't overwhelm. Trying to find new tools that make it easier to
embrace it and understand it, and may play on things they've done
before, that's the things I look for to help them out.


Bob:  I'm sorry, you were...


Wendy:  No, go ahead. [laughs]


Bob:  Do you guys have user experience
embedded in with your product teams or are they a separate agency
kind of model, or a little bit of both?


Wendy:  A little bit of both. I'll say a
little bit of both.


Bob:  That's great.


Tammy:  I was just going to say that I
really like the Audacious Salon stuff because it's talking about
a lot of the things we've already talked about in a new way or in
a new light. I appreciate that. For me, working with the teams
that I'm working with, I think they have been inundated with
Agile and Scrum.


How do we talk about it in a way that they can hear it, and not
that stance of, "This is the only way."


Bob:  I've always thought that was a
ridiculous notion that Agile was a thing to concentrate on. It's
a tool. Toyota Production System wouldn't have rested on a single
process for very long without changing itself. [laughs] It's a
means to great product outcomes.


Tammy:  I try to break it down for them as
much as possible. Obviously, we care about the frameworks that
we're using, but I try to break it down into simple questions.
Answer these simple questions and that will help you get to that
thing you're trying to produce, your vision.


That'll help you develop that vision. That'll help you develop
that, "what's the next big thing?" I look for trying to, using
Agile principles, break it down as small as possible to help them
break through.


Bob:  Thank you very much. I really
appreciate you guys coming in and chatting. I hope you have a
great talk.


Wendy:  Thank you for asking us on the
show.


Tammy:  Thank you.


Bob:  Although I think it's right at the
same time as mine.


Wendy:  It is exactly the same time.
[laughs]


Bob:  I hope it is not terribly
well‑attended.


[laughter]


Tammy:  Wow, I was going to say I hope you
have a full house.


[laughter]


Bob:  Thank you. Me, too. [laughs] No, I'm
sure there are so many folks. We've got 2,300 people at this
conference. We're both going to have the right...whoever shows
are the right people.


Wendy:  Are the right people.


Tammy:  Exactly.


Bob:  It's open space principle.


Tammy:  Thanks for inviting us.


Bob:  Yeah, no problem.


Wendy:  Thank you very much.


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[music]