Bend the knee and sprint repeatedly - training a university to become more agile
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Plone Conference 20194 / 50
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
Thank you. That was exactly the words I was going to start with presentation. So I'm Rick Upecka from University of U of Ascula. I'm here going to tell you about how we are transforming our university
00:24
and the way we are doing things in a larger scale. So I've been at the university for well many years and doing first software development and later other stuff. And been working with Agile and team building and with Plone for very many years.
00:48
And my topic today that I'm going to talk about the challenges in the great digitalization journey that we are having. And then our solution that we are trying to use it with. And then some practical advice maybe for other universities or organizations.
01:06
So our university in a nutshell we have some 15,000 students for ourselves and then another 15,000 students for Open University. Six faculties. We are a middle sized university.
01:21
But what's interesting is that we have this unit called digital services. So about 90 professionals work with digital services, management, infrastructure and then the service desk. And we have tens of projects or tens of products in our university that we are developing.
01:44
But there's even there's demand for more. So with a couple of changes in our university higher management there's now a new vision for digitalization. And there is lots of stuff that we already have achieved.
02:01
But also lots of stuff that we are hoping to achieve. We are aiming to be this artificial intelligence supported digital university smart campus or something like that in a couple of years. And how we are going to do that. Let's see.
02:21
This is the current or this is the way that we are developing software at the University of VivaScula. There's of course internal development teams. We use Python, Java and JavaScript and lots of different stuff. We run our own microservices and our own infrastructure. But nowadays we are moving towards the outsourced development and some ready-made software that we are using.
02:48
And there's going to be a lot of integrations in between. And this is the stack that we are dealing with. And the challenges we had a year ago.
03:01
This picture tries to explain it that we had lots of silos. We had different projects. We had different priorities from different stakeholders. And from the project or team point of view there were classic priorities and needs. And from the management perspective it looked like we didn't get the right stuff done.
03:24
So what could help in this situation when you need to develop products? Well, probably agile software development. And I've been into agile for many long years. Even maybe before I knew what it was in the name.
03:41
But trying to continuously provide value to the users. Hopefully doing it in teams and collaboratively and adapting the chains. And so on. But I work in a big corporation, university. So team level practices doesn't cut it in the large scale.
04:03
So we want to change our way of working for the whole university. The whole way our development is done. We need someone who knows what this change is all about. We need definitely someone to convince the top management and the mandate for change.
04:21
And we call this digital transformation management in Finnish DUO. And it's the way to facilitate the digital journey that we are going through. And we are hoping to create usable services for our users, students and staff and visitors.
04:43
And DUO is based on SAFE. Scaled Agile Framework. And this is the big picture of it. And I was into agile long before I heard about SAFE. And my opinion about it was like this.
05:01
And maybe like this. And also this. So is SAFE the right way to do things if you want to be agile and productive and stuff like that? And my sources are based on Twitter.
05:20
Agile memes. Hashtag. So it's not a professional source. But I've been following the agile movement and the no project stuff and stuff like that for many years. And now that I've worked with SAFE for one year, there are positive things in the core of SAFE. There's lean and agile stuff.
05:41
There are clear instructions on how to get things started or how to do things. The public website contains all the materials that you might need. And it's easy to find consultants if you need ones. So there's good in it. And these are some basic principles that are inside SAFE.
06:04
So the goal is to provide value to the users, to the customers. And while doing it, it's not just project, but it's continuous flow of providing the value. And then there has to be respect for culture and people that are doing the work.
06:26
And there has to be time for innovation so it's not only just making features and services available. And you have to relentlessly improve the way that you are working and doing things.
06:41
And in the bottom of it, some lean, agile leadership. Not management, but leadership things underlying. So that's good stuff. And this is where we were when we started. We had some agile maturity since we had a couple of long lasting teams that were working effectively.
07:04
Building incrementally and visualizing their working process and so on. And we had decentralized some decision making. So in the team level we had the authority to say how we do things.
07:20
So this was the starting point in our journey last year. And so Duo is based on SAFE. And we want to increase the quality of our products and services. Increase the transparency of how we are doing things and the productivity. And still keep the people happy and motivated and furthermore.
07:43
So a couple of things to highlight from this SAFE big picture. Everything we do is somewhat aligned to the university strategy and vision. So we want to do the right things for the big picture. And then there's lots of communication between the development teams and the product owners.
08:05
And hopefully with the customers also. And then the important thing is the cyclic nature of the development. And sprints or scrum or stuff like that isn't new anymore.
08:22
But for our university working in a shorter cycles and planning in shorter cycles in a large scale. It's like a nice thing. So this is what we are dealing with. And the really good thing is that even though if this picture looks like there's lots of planning and little delivery.
08:44
And even little maintenance. It's kind of vice versa. But the important thing is that the university top management is on board of this change. So it's important for the steering groups from three different categories.
09:00
Education and learning, research and intelligent digital environment. And it's important for those people to be on board and to make the roadmap for the bigger themes. And then we have this development train that stops every three months.
09:20
And then we take stuff into the train and then move forward for the three months in that environment. Couple of principles we have in Duo. So there has to be lots of prioritization. We are using timeboxing to cut things down.
09:40
We try to simplify things every way we can. We try to manage risks when we plan the next three months. We try to highlight what are the possible risks we are dealing with and deal with them before they even happen. We favor teamwork and try to eliminate waste. And gather feedback and react to that feedback during the three months.
10:02
Okay. So it's called program increment in SAFE. The three month cycle. It's divided into five iterations. About two weeks or sprints of two weeks. Which are dedicated to developing the next important things in the roadmap.
10:23
And the sixth iteration is dedicated to planning and innovation. So there is a buffer or time to do some innovative thinking or training or stuff like that. So it's not continuously just sprinting from next sprint to another. And that's a good thing.
10:40
And during this three month interval, the steering groups are already thinking ahead about the next important things in the near future and in the far future. And one really visual or clear change that SAFE has and we have had is this program increment planning days.
11:03
Originally maybe two days or four days or something like that. But we have cut it down to 1.5 days. About 60 people mostly from digital services but also from other university units. Administration and faculties are participating there.
11:22
And we always start with the digital vision and some architectural stuff. And then the product owners present their cases and their hopes for the important features that we need to get done. And it's based on face to face communication. And we are aiming to plan and visualize the work for every team.
11:44
We have some 8 or 10 teams in the digital services that we are using there. The plan, visualize the work and then agree on the goals that we are aiming for. And those goals are then communicated back to the steering group.
12:01
So they also know that what we agreed on. So couple of nice pictures of people doing work together in this big room. So there has to be, we are trying to find the shared vision and understanding on what are the most important priorities for the next increment.
12:23
We built the team boards together. Everyone gets to participate here in the planning building. And then this is one really useful feature in SAFE. It's called program board. It shows on the swim lanes each different team.
12:44
And then we highlight the most important features that we are aiming to deliver during the next three months. And the red lines crisscrossing there are dependencies. So when we highlight the dependencies beforehand it's easier to discuss about them and make sure that they are worked on during that time.
13:06
And also there are deadlines so if there are exact deadlines we know when they are coming. And we try to also work on that. And on the wall there will be risks so we try to mitigate the risks or resolve them beforehand.
13:27
And at the end of the planning days we try to achieve the common goals, agree on the major features and identify the risks. And you can see it in the lower picture but people are actually smiling there.
13:41
So it's a good couple of days that we are having. Couple of planning tips. Planning before planning is needed. That's kind of counter intuitive but there is the two week time spot for the planning before planning. And holidays are not a risk when you are planning.
14:03
You always know when summer and Christmas is coming. And if you are a university you have to plan according to your yearly cycle. Now the students are coming in and now it's summer and so on. And don't worry about estimating. Just do a little work on the estimations but don't hang yourself on them.
14:25
That's important. And we serve pizza for the planning. So during this year I have ordered some hundreds of pizza boxes to the planning days and everybody likes pizza. So that's maybe one of the reasons people like to come to the planning days.
14:40
Okay. Couple of more things still to go. Tools. We are using Jira for our features and for our epics and different kinds of listings. Then we have GitLab for issues and repos and version control. We created something called Duo dashboard for better transparency.
15:00
I will show you that next. And then we have a couple of chat tools for communication during the program increments. So here's Jira. It's probably familiar to most of you. But what we also did was this Duo dashboard.
15:22
It's a homemade Jira integration built with Gatsby JS. Really blazingly fast website. That shows our next increment. What we are building on and in what state of progress the features will be. And there is teams board. There are epics board and theme board.
15:42
So we can look at the situation from different angles. And that's totally public. So even you guys can see it if you go to that address. And what's important is when we do the feature issues, tickets in the Jira. We write down what value does the feature bring. So that's important practice to keep in mind.
16:05
Okay. So wrapping kind of up. Does Duo work? This is the feedback that we have been getting. You accomplish so much more than before. Okay. It's nice to hear when you are a developer or development team.
16:20
And then we want to add up this model to other areas of business too. Okay. That's nice to hear. And this helps us to clarify and prioritize our goals. That's also what we have been hearing. So this kind of practice to do helps. Other positive things. The three month cycle it's easy to understand.
16:42
Okay. Three months it's a quarter of year. We can understand that. And the whole organization is moving at the same pace in the planning. Then the Duo makes the amount of needed work visible in the planning days. So maybe we can hire new people if needed in the future.
17:04
And the development teams have the piece to focus on the things that have been prioritized. So no surprise project that much more. And some teams that haven't been new to Agile now know the formal methods of doing things.
17:21
Like Kanban. So some questions. Does Duo work? Maybe. We kind of still develop as fast and effective as before. But maybe only the transparency has increased. Maybe that's something. And there is some overhead with the planning before planning and all the tools we have.
17:41
And the innovation and planning iteration we are having. It's used often mostly for planning and not so much for innovation. Even though I have to say that we are keeping these code camps one day event for our developers every three months. That was our practice even before SAFE. But it didn't like take it away.
18:02
So that's a nice thing. And in the end there are plans to implement a new project portfolio management system university wide. Everything is a project. Which is kind of interesting compared to the first presentation today. And it's interesting to see where that goes.
18:21
But let's see. Couple of more lessons learned. I'm wondering if I still have time. Yeah, I'm doing actually great. Alright. I can enjoy the last couple of slides. So treat SAFE as a framework. Not a strict rule book.
18:41
You can take the good stuff out of it and leave the irrational stuff away. But that means that you have to have some professionals in your organization. I'm not talking solely about me. But other people who know agile development and organizational change too.
19:05
So that agile maturity really helps. So you know what is good for you and what is not. Then the boundaries and time boxing. It helps to focus on the right things and not think of million things at the same time. And also boundaries helps you to maybe think of innovative ways of solving problems.
19:25
So we only have this amount of time. What can we do? We can't like buy a software from here if we have only one week to solve this. So time boxing helps in that. And this duo has also forced product owners and some other groups to think about their processes.
19:45
Can we solve this problem by changing our process? Not only just creating a new IT system that's in the near future. In the 6 months or 12 months or so. So improve your process instead of always getting a new IT system.
20:05
And management buy-in and support is a key. I have to compliment our management really that we have had this opportunity to do this change. And they are totally on board on this. And we are aiming for maximum transparency in communication that is really really important.
20:26
It builds trust in both ways from top down to bottom up and vice versa in between. And then the professional coaches or change agents with a mandate are needed. Rinse and repeat. Iterate your process.
20:41
We started with something a year ago. We have had these planning days 5 times now and we have always gathered feedback and tried to improve on the process. And always trying to improve the things we are doing. And maybe this is the situation that we are now from a safe perspective.
21:04
We are thinking systems as a whole, hopefully. A whole university and overall flow of things and information. We still build incrementally with fast integrated learning cycles. We now better manage queue lengths by using these three month intervals.
21:27
We have the cadence in place and cross domain planning. And I hope that this has increased the motivation of our knowledge workers. And still the decentralized decision making is in place somewhat.
21:42
Okay, so this was it. Thank you. So if there are questions, first of all I am going to ask people to really stick to questions.
22:03
And not something that should be a talk on their own. Or a lightning talk. So questions please. And wait for the microphone because it is being taped.
22:20
You had two slides about the advantages and the situation where people say does it work or maybe it works. And there was no it does not work. And the one thing I want to see because my experience is that communication and transparency is the essential part.
22:43
It does not really matter which framework or which tool you adopt. But the communication and the transparency shares the vision. How do you see that? Is that the thing that with the different communication you enable more people sharing and working on it?
23:04
Or did you have people that say it does not work for them? About the vision. I think when the management is sharing this one. So this is shared quite openly in our university.
23:22
I think this vision sharing helps. And the transparency and the communication. Maybe before this it was like the ground level was communicating upwards. But now also from the top level is information coming down.
23:41
Well it always has but maybe in a different way nowadays.