3 Features of Agile that I Love

In this week's episode, Ricardo talks about three aspects, features or characteristics of agile that we all should learn and apply.

Listen to the podcast to know them.

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Episode transcript

The transcript is generated automatically by Podscribe, Sonix, Otter and other electronic transcription services.

Ricardo (4s):
Hello everyone, welcome to the five Minutes Podcast. Today, I like to share with you three features that I really love on a Agile Methods, and I tried to use them as much as I can. You know, regardless if I'm using waterfall (predictive), I try because they are related to human behavior and they are related to how do you collect the benefits as early as you can. So the first feature is the concept of MVP or minimum viable product. This is something like a magic concept, instead of you having everything ready, and then you start selling or getting revenue are getting the benefit You've tried to release a small pieces, that we will not provide to you the full benefit, but they will start delivering you some benefit.

Ricardo (55s):
And I want to show this by giving you an example, and I don't want to use an it example, because I know if you go on the web, there are hundreds of ID, examples of MVP. I want to talk about construction. So imagine that you, you and your partner, you are recently Married or your presentably living together and you're renting a house, but You want to build your own house, but to have limited resources. So you want to really to build a big house with a lot of rooms, with a swimming Pool, whatever, but at that moment, if you wait until you have all the money and all of the infrastructure to deliver that, maybe to take to long for you to do that.

Ricardo (1m 42s):
So what do you do? You keep in your mind that big picture of the house of your dream, but you try to plan it in a smaller way. So you say, okay, I want Five bedrooms, but today I will do just One bedroom. I planned to have a swimming pool, but at this time I will just leave that area with grass. And maybe the future of I will dig something in there. And this is The MVP is about because instead of waiting 10 years for you to get all the resources, to build the house, you get make it in a half a year. And then you move in, you stop paying rental in over time when money comes in and when your time comes in, you start implementing that.

Ricardo (2m 28s):
This is the root of the concept of the minimal viable product is, what it is the minimum you can have as a resident for you to just jump in and leave your rental. This is a concept, one of the magic things I saw that one day I was in New York and I saw a very high rise buildings being built, that I saw the lights in, you know I would say, the first 10th floors and then constructions on the top until I was say, why is that? You know, people were living on the lower floor, so while they were building the top floors. So these is the concept of MVP.

Ricardo (3m 9s):
Maybe the MVP will not be releasing every week in that construction project. But you Can't phase, instead of you waiting to have a hundred floors ready, you already start sailing, or you already start delivering and getting revenue for that. The second one is the daily scrum. The second feature I love, and I'm calling daily scrum that if you don't like it, you can say daily ,meetings, you can say a stand-up meeting, but I love the features of what a daily scrum is. First is a 15 minute max meeting. So it's not letting me repeat, It is not a status meetings is not that someone sit there to report.

Ricardo (3m 52s):
I did this, I did that, then someone take a note and do that no, it's not the nap date. So it's a team working together, the developers working together to plan what they should do in the next 24 hours. And you do this sharp and why I love the concept of stand up because most of the people do this standing up. So to be fast, really quick decision making, and how do we move forward. And maybe afterwards parts of the team will meet again to do a more detailed approach on what they are planning to do, but every single day, these will happen.

Ricardo (4m 32s):
And the third one, the third feature, it's one of the features that I desire must. I need to be honest, it's not very easy to implement. It's the concept of self-organization and shared accountability. These for me is a dream when you get it, that means that the team it self organized the team does not need someone to oh, I plan and you do, no they plan and they do. They organize themselves in the best way to deliver the product, why? Because they are accountable, it's not the traditional command chain where, you know, I don't care.

Ricardo (5m 12s):
I have a boss, I just tel a boss that I'm late. And the boss is accountable for that, or the boss that, or the project manager, whoever. It's a shared accountability, every single one is responsible, and they share these responsibility. And for me, as I said, a couple of seconds ago, It's not easy to think on shared accountability. Because for example, if you work on a technology company were, most of the team is at the same level of, of course we were talking about a huge diversity, but you know, they, are developers, you are developer. They are a team that when you are working in the field, that I operate a lot, that is a way, for example, construction on a large construction, you have 10 to 12,000 people in a project.

Ricardo (6m 2s):
It's not very easy for you to have shared accountability, because it's so many people that it's not very easy for you, even if you break these into a smaller teams, you know, its not because people have different backgrounds, different history of life, different values is so it's not very easy for you to see if someone that is working for you that is working on a project is really filling accountable for, for example, a building a half, you know, a, a power plant or a massive industrial complex. So it's not very easy to think that way, however, if you can increase and improve this sense of accountability and this sense of shared accountability, you win big.

Ricardo (6m 52s):
So if you for example, are working on agile models, are working on scaling agile and if you could sort out and find ways of getting a massive amount of people from different backgrounds, working together, having the same feeling of shared accountability, you will win big. You will win big deeds is my dream, and this is something that I try to do every single day. It's not very easy. I had some good reasons so on some trials, some not so good results on order, but these, and these is for me, one of the biggest pillars and these are so he's why, for example, in the technology, it's less complex to do that because you have a more, I would say integrate the team and the team has approximately I would say the same level or the same, you know, the same background.

Ricardo (7m 50s):
I'm not saying that they are equal, but they have the same but when you had these, you know, for example, when you have a worker that is making them minimum wage with an engineer, with a technician and everything, it's not as simple and its not as clear when if you compare with a smaller team in a localized a project. So these are for me is the biggest challenge and if we can solve that, then it's a dream. But I really love, and I try to do this every single time in my projects. I hope you found this podcast useful. Thank you very much. And I apologize for taking almost 10 minutes on this one. Take care!

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