Episode 156 – Agile Beyond IT

How is Agile relevant beyond IT? Alan Zucker explains how agile roots are in the Lean manufacturing movement as he shares about the application of agile practices for non-technology projects. He talks about agile as a mindset, the Gemba Walk, House of Lean, transparency in teams, value stream mapping, and much more. Recently Alan launched a new Velociteach InSite course: Agile Beyond IT, a hands-on application of agile practices for non-technology challenges. Table of Contents 01:59 … Agile Beyond IT03:09 … Blurring the Lines between Traditional and Agile06:04 … Fusion Cooking and Project Management07:21 … Agile as a Mindset not a Methodology10:19 … Self-Organizing and Self-Managing11:32 … Empowering Team Members12:36 … Iterative and Incremental15:12 … Iterative and Incremental in Non-IT Projects15:21 … The House of Lean17:43 … Transparency in Healthy Teams19:22 … The Gemba Walk22:53 … Agile Manifesto beyond IT24:59 … 12 Agile Principles beyond IT27:41 … Dignity28:49 … Value Stream Mapping in Non-IT31:39 … Advice for New Leaders32:57 … Get in Touch with Alan34:19 … Closing ALAN ZUCKER: Another is trusting the wisdom of the team, recognizing that you don’t need to come up with all the answers, or potentially even any of the answers; that your strength lies in bringing out the experience and knowledge of everybody else on the team. WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This.  My name is Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio is Bill Yates.  This is the podcast about project management.  We are excited to bring our guest to you today.  This is actually someone we’ve had before. BILL YATES:  Yes. WENDY GROUNDS:  Alan Zucker is joining us.  He’s a certified project management professional.  He’s an Agile Foundation certificate holder, a Scrum Master, a Scaled Agilist, as well as a keynote speaker. BILL YATES:  We have a course that we are launching.  This one is called “Agile Beyond IT.”  It’s a part of our self-paced training in InSite.  Alan created the “Fundamentals of Agile” course for us, and the feedback was always positive, and sometimes he’d get the comment, “I don’t work in technology, so how does this apply to me?”  Well, that’s something that he’s dealt with a lot in some of the consulting and other training that he’s done for organizations. For several years Alan’s helped clients use agile principles and practices in diverse non-technology fields, everything from construction to not-for-profits.  These experiences are the basis for this class.  And he pulls some of the concepts from the agile principles and says, “Okay, here’s the principle.  How can we apply this beyond IT?”  Very practical, great advice. Alan has got multiple agile certifications from PMI, the Scrum Alliance, Disciplined Agile, and Scaled Agile.  He’s created courses for us.  He instructs for us.  He is in the classroom.  In fact, as we wrap up this session today, he’s going to begin a four-day PMP prep class for us.  And we’re delighted to have him with us. WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Alan.  Welcome to Manage This once again.  Thank you for joining us. ALAN ZUCKER:  Hi.  It’s great to see you guys again. Agile Beyond IT WENDY GROUNDS:  Now, we’ve just mentioned that you have completed a course for us, “Agile Beyond IT.”  And we’re very excited to publish this one.  It’s an excellent course.  Could you give us a little bit of a background for this and why you picked that name for the course? ALAN ZUCKER:  Sure.  So a few years ago I created a “Fundamentals of Agile” course for Velociteach.  And it’s been very popular.  But as we were looking at some of the comments that people left, people were saying, “Well, this was a really great course, but it was all about technology, and I’m in a non-technology area.  How can I use agile?”  So we had some conversations, and we put together a course for people that aren’t in technology.  And it just so happened that around the same time I was thinking, how do I begin to sort of coalesce and distill some of the ideas I had around agile because I’ve been working with very non-traditional organizations and teaching them agile techniques to better manage their work.  Like I’ve done a lot of work with nonprofits, and that’s really been very interesting to show them, hey, you can use these agile techniques.  And they love it. Blurring the Lines between Traditional and Agile BILL YATES:  Alan, I’m going to quote Alan at Alan.  There’s a key concept that you share early on in the course.  And I’m going to quote it:  “As the profession evolves, successful project managers will be pragmatic and select the best practices based on the project context.  In other words, the lines between traditional and agile project management will blur, and we will pick the best tools and practices based on our project’s needs.”  I love that.  I completely agree with that.  But let’s dig into it a little bit further.  How do you see the lines blurring? ALAN ZUCKER:  So I think if we look at project management or the history of project management, traditional project management really came from construction, really from engineering and the expectation that we can design something and build it.  And if you’re looking at an office building, that’s what they do.  Turns out that my son-in-law is a construction project manager and has worked on some big buildings here in the DC area.  So you’ve got your designs and your specs.  You bring in the guys that do the excavation, and the concrete guys, and they pour the floors.  And then you bring in the plumbers and the carpenters and three different types of metal workers.  And it works where you’ve got a good design. Agile started in software development.  And agile works really well there because we’ve found and we know that we cannot fully articulate what we need upfront.  So the idea of iterating through and getting feedback and moving forward works well.  And I think that for a lot of us, if we begin to think about, well, what are the best practices from either side of the spectrum, we begin to pick and choose and say, well, it might make sense to do a daily standup, even if I’m working in a traditional environment.  Or that maybe we need to do more structured risk management on our agile projects. BILL YATES:  Yeah, those are good.  I love the concept of bringing the best out of both and blurring those together.  Now  whenever we talk about this, I’m sure we have some purists that are really on both sides, both camps. ALAN ZUCKER:  Yeah. BILL YATES:  Who do you think’s going to get more upset by that?  You think the Agilists or the Waterfall teams are going to be more upset by that? ALAN ZUCKER:  I think you’re going to have folks on either side that aren’t going to be very happy.  I think that the people on the Waterfall side, you know, if you’re working construction there’s probably less that you would adopt from agile.  And the things that we recommend would probably be, “Hey, that’s a great idea.”  I think the Agilists sort of came in as the insurrectionists 20 years ago.  And I think they are beginning to slowly move to say, well, there are things of value from traditional project management. Fusion Cooking and Project Management WENDY GROUNDS:  Alan, in your course you compared project management to fusion cooking.  Can you explain that for us? ALAN ZUCKER:  Sure.  I think that originally one of the ideas I was thinking of or the titles of the course I was thinking of was Agile Fusion, or Project Fusion.  I like the idea of blending and mixing.  So I think in the course I talked about this great sushi restaurant that I go to in Mexico, where they’re making traditional sushi, but then mixing in Mexican spices and peppers.  Or there’s a place here in D.C. where there’s Eggs Benedict, and then they use Beef Bulgogi as the topping.  And I think it’s just the idea that there is all these really great ideas that we can share and we can mix.  And if we don’t think about things in this very compartmentalized way, just phenomenal, inventive, creative things can happen. BILL YATES:  You make me think of I like watching Bobby Flay, the famous chef Bobby Flay.  There’s a show where people are trying to come on and beat him.  And he’s always taking some traditional recipe and adding his own style, and it’s usually some kind of like a serrano pepper or something that he adds to it that just takes it to another level.  And the judges love it.  So there’s that idea of fusion. Agile as a Mindset not a Methodology There are so many little pieces that we can pull from agile practices that are very applicable and very helpful in those environments.  And that’s what I appreciate about the course.  We’ll get into the details.  But instead of saying, okay, you must do this, it’s more of a, hey, consider the mindset behind this.  Consider the mindset of agile in this and what is something from that.  If we look at that mindset, how can we take that and move that into the way that we’re managing projects?  A vital point that you make is that agile, don’t think of it as a methodology as much as a mindset.  Talk more about that. ALAN ZUCKER:  So I came to project management from economics.  I have my master’s degree in economics.  So I was the accidental project manager.  And back in the dark ages, back in the 1980s, I was working for a firm that was doing environmental consulting work.  And I was working with a senior economist to develop a model of what would happen under different environmental regulations.  This was the dawn of the computer age. I built this massive model in Lotus 1-2-3 Release 1A.  And he had some ideas about, well, this is how the model should work based on some previous experience.  And I had a little bit of experience with personal computers. So we would build a little bit, and then we would troubleshoot, and we would go back, and we would review.