​Autotrader Agile Nights talks 06/09/2016

These are my notes from the talk I went to at AutoTrader’s Agile Nights event.

Talk 2: Organisational Effectiveness: Doug Talbot from Ocado

Before my notes begin I would like to say that this is more a talk about his very interesting role as a Catalyst.

Doug Talbot is a Catalyst at Occado Technology; Occado makes their own distribution software, technology and robotics; they also develop and retail a selling platform that help similar companies with their logistics and robotics. 

A Catalysts are a team that look at psychology, coaching, Lean + Agile methodologies, tech and maths to improve the effectiveness of the workplace and the company. They found that Trust is the most important thing in the squads, also the needs of the people, collaboration and the ability to adapt and reallocate resources are important. Getting the right people, the right thing being built right is a formula for great business.

Going into an environment and teaching the process of a methodology is not enough, you need leadership to support, improve, maintain and demonstrate the culture and its ideals. 

Being a Catalyst is to give the environment and tools for the people to develop their own practices.

Evidence Based Management Model: Ask, Search, criticise, implement, evaluate. Repeat. Using this model the Catalysts try and test little changes in individual squads to see the effects to see if it should be introduced to the rest of the squads. 

Psychology: Complexity theory, find solid science to help, theory or constraints, Real Options Maths Scholes theory, Behavioural Economics, Complex adaptive systems. They use psychology to research new and effective ways to help the culture, and back these ideas with facts.

Ocado Catalyst Initiatives: Tribe/Product organisation, measuring outcomes, values, scrapping annual appraisals for more continuous communication, leadership training, developing a promotions model, situational interviewing techniques, peer feedback, agile coaching, having leaders focused on skills over efficiency.

J. Richard Hackman wrote Collaborative Intelligence; this book promotes peer coaching to tackle dynamic and complex problems. Trust is important in your team, far more important than adhering to practices. 

80% of developers think they are above average; but the truth is that there is no standard, no objectivity that you can measure against, so it’s impossible to evaluate. However if you focus on teamwork, that you can measure with peer review and questionnaires which you can measure you’ll get quality work. EQ is more important and effective than IQ. 

Many books give lots of advice and sometimes this advice is contradicting, this is because you need to try different things out and find what fits your team and your environment. Developing software is not a one size fits all, it has different ways of doing everything varying in logic, techniques and solution and so are the teams. Spotify uses Squads, Gore uses Leadership, Valve uses extreme job-crafting.

When researching psychology make sure you are looking at what’s relative; looking at research done with mobile app developers may not be relative to those maintaining a legacy product. Catalyst teams are only in charge of optimising the people not the practice. However bear in mind that there is no perfect solution, it’s a delicate changing balance to continually improve.