Now, I've just a few myths.

A lot of people think, oh,

Agile is not for all projects, it's not for operations,

it's not for big, there's scope creep. These are all

myths.

Agile is actually very, very disciplined. And who are you

accountable for as an Agile team member? Who do you think

you feel the most accountability to? To yourself and the

team.

It is not oh, you know, to the project manager. It's to

yourself. It's just amazing. And then there's no design.

Of course you have to design. Of course you have to plan.

Of course you need architects. You need estimation. You

need project managers because the bigger the programs, you

do need it.

So, these are all myths. Now I come to the big point. But

we are all distributed to what do I do? How do we do all

these fantastic things we were talking about when we're not

sitting together?

Just like you told you, you can do five in five seconds,

I'm telling you, you can do it. Now, there are some rules.

If you're distributed, you have to have some agreements.

You have to have some standards. You have to have some

tools. You have to have some processes.

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Is it overhead? Yeah, it is a bit of overhead. And that

overhead is the benefit you're getting by using

capabilities in different parts of the world. Now, should

you splinter completely, two in Bangalore, two in Calcutta,

one in New York, one in Shanghai? No. That doesn't make

sense. But if you have two teams, three teams, okay.

So there are some rules. The first rule is don't. As far

as possible, try to co-locate. So, you don't want seven

people spread over seven locations. Maybe two locations.

So, now, if you can't, then don't treat remotes as if they

were locals. That's very important. You have to think

about if somebody's remote, you have to take the time

difference into account. You cannot say we're meeting at

seven o'clock and it is one a.m. in the morning there.

Just doesn't work. You have to be considerate, you have to

respect that.

The second one is don't treat locals as if they were

remote. If you're in the same...I mean, we sit in some

offices, yeah, the office is empty and people between five

kilometers and 50 kilometers from the office working from

home.

That's fine sometimes. But collaboration needs

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conversation. It's better to think about working together.

The fourth point is the most important one. Latitude

hurts. So, if you're, let us say, L.A. and Guadalajara and

Mexico, same line. Yeah, I know you're separate, but it's

in the same time zone.

What about Bratislava and New York. What's the time

difference? Six house, not too bad. How about Bratislava

and L.A.? Yeah, what's the overlap? Very little. Normal

9:00 to 5:00 overlap. What is it? Almost nothing.

So, longitude hurts. So, you must try, as far as possible,

to see where you can get latitudinal displacement and not

longitude. So, the IBM team in Shanghai works with the Sun

Corp team in Sydney, Australia, almost the same latitude,

almost two hours time difference. It's doable.

But not nine hours. It gets very difficult and you have to
find ways to do that. Now so don't always be remote. It's

very important at the setup of the project that the key

people are together, co-located.

So, that means flying somebody from here there, flying

somebody from there here. Now, if you look at the savings

of distributed work, you may...let's say it's hundred

dollars for somebody in the U.K. or in New York and you do

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the work somewhere else. Maybe you'll get it for $40. You

think you've saved $60.

But if you don't invest anything back, you've saved zero

because productivity will drop. You have to take the $60

and invest $30 back in travel, in tools, in techniques, in

process, flying people around. And then you save $30.

Still good.

So, invest in the appropriate tools. Now, you need video

conferencing. You do. So, IBM are rolling out the SMIT

TVs, Skype TVs. They can be 24 hours on, if you've got two

teams in two locations, you can halve the table. Whether

you work at this end, the other end, there's a screen, a TV

screen, and the same in the other location.

So, 24 hours, you can talk to somebody instantly as if

they're in the next room. Think oh, then we don't have

budget. Well, you'll have to because you'll have to show

the productivity for it. It makes sense.

And lastly, you have to establish standards and agreements.

This is where we are storing our documents. This is how

we're doing our walls. People say, how do you do your

walls? How do you do it?

You have the wall in one location, you discuss using the

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video or Skype. You take a photograph and you send it by

email. Simple. So, the other person has now got a

photograph that they can print.

You can put it on connections. You can put it in a

directory. You can do all sorts of things and there are

new tools coming which Shawn and his team are also working

on, like Murally and Lino It and a few others. So, we'll

find tools to do yellow stickies when you're geographically

spread.

How do you workshop when you're geographically spread? And

there are web-based tools, cloud-based tools that can help

you with this.

So, apply your mind. We have to stop coloring by numbers.

You know what that means? As a kid, you get this picture,

number 3, red. Number 4, blue. Number 5, green. And you

color the picture by numbers.

We have to think. We have to stop want be to be told how

to do every single thing. So, in Agile, we'll give you the

framework but you are empowered to think and to find ways

to solve it.

And when you apply your mind, magic happens. You will find

the way to do it. So, this is an important picture as

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well. For success, there are two strands to the DNA. One

strand is culture and the other strand is capability.

Agile will not lift your capability. That's very important

to understand. But it will expose the capability gaps or

the capability greatness. So, be very conscious of this,

that you could get...if you've got a great team, oh, we're

very Agile. But they don't have the capability, then you

get happy duds.

On the other hand, if you've only got great capability and

no good culture, then you get a toxic team. You don't want

that either. So, Agile will show you where your capability

gaps are.

And then as a team, you support each other, you train, you

coach. Maybe you need to bring in some new blood. Maybe

you need to rotate staff to different areas. But it's

something that you will see.

Now, there are lots of pitfalls on your Agile journey.

Again, as I say, it's like riding a cycle. You can read

the book How to Ride a Cycle, part one, part two, part

three. Do you know how to ride a cycle? No. When will

you know how to ride a cycle? When you get on the cycle.

So, as you get on the cycle, yes, you're going to fall. I

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can guarantee that. Yes you're going to make mistakes.

Hundred percent guarantee. But don't worry about it.

Some of the key mistakes is, yeah, you don't have the right

environment. You've got all cubicles. There's no wall

space. People have said to me, we don't have wall space.

What do I do?

Well, we found one of the people who went down to the local

little, what is that, Home Depot, Bunnings kind of shop

here where you get these big boards. Pin plywood

cardboard, cut a little handle. Now you've got a mobile

wall. It's that big. Ten dollars. You can use it.

So, you can be creative about everything. So, the

environment problems, then you've got knowledge. You

haven't been trained in Agile. You don't know what Agile

is and you suddenly start doing Agile.

Then you will fall harder, and you'll really hurt yourself.

And then you do, oh, this is rubbish. I'm not doing Agile

anymore. So, get trained.

The other one is capability. So, sometimes, you need good

PMs, good iteration managers who know Agile well to guide

you. You need coaches, et cetera. And leadership as well

have to change.

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So, these are the four areas that normally, when you start

your Agile journey, you struggle. But being aware of it

already the leaders and the teams, you start going through

getting it better.

So, these are the impacts. So, you need resource

allocation, work prioritization, structure, leadership

style, authentic transparency. You have to start showing

the truth. Don't cover it up.

If you've got too many projects and 80 percent are red,

show it. They're red. Now we can do something about it.

If you make them green, green, green, green, green,

suddenly one day they're all red.

So, and why do we change? Why Agile? Why not something

else? And that's it. Important one is that. If you've

got a happy people in a happy environment, automatically

the risk reduces.

You get faster time to market. That, that, happy customers

and, at the bottom, you are hitting the bottom and top

line. So, it's not just about, oh, let's have fun and

that's it. It's also about being productive.

[END OF SEGMENT]

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