Agile Mindset and Culture by Hithem Ahmed at the third Agile Days.

1. Agile Mindset & Culture
by Hithem Ahmed

2. Agenda
• Mindset Big picture
• Our mindset
• Explore your mindset
• Agile mindset
• Products with and without agile mindset
• Logical Levels of Learning and Change
• True agility

3. The Big Picture

4. Our Mindset
• Elements of a Mind-Set
– Values: Most Important
– Beliefs: Contextual Beliefs
– Principles: standards, choices, actions and
decisions

5. What’s your mindset
• Values
– Minimize cost and schedule
– Build the right thing
– Make accurate commitments
– Eliminate the risk of disaster
– Maximize perceived quality
– Be able to change priorities quickly
– Be able to replace the workers easily
– Innovate
– Keep auditors happy
– Build happy teams that work well together
– Get rewarded or promoted

6. What’s your mindset
• Beliefs
– If we sign off on requirements now and the team will finish
developing them six months from now, the requirements will
still be valuable and relevant.
– Customer is engaged frequently.
– Placing workers where their skills are most needed is a good
way to finish projects.
– People really care only for themselves.
– If we do all the design before starting implementation, we
reduce risk and avoid rework.
– The documentation of how a piece is constructed will be
useful to the next team member on the job.
– If we invite certain senior managers to our meetings, we
won’t get in trouble later.
– If we hire great people, we’ll have great performance.
– If we propose a compelling, sensible improvement, people
will naturally want to implement it, and proceed to do that.
– Clear processes and roles should be defined

7. Mindset
• Value (Collaborating with customers,
environment that people thrive together)
– Agile Mindset
• Value (Manfacturing many copies -- Repeatively)
– Lean Mindset
• Value (prove that you are solving the right
problem)
– Lean startup Mindset
• Value (getting the solution right from the first
time)
– WaterFall Mindset

8. Agile Mindset

9. Values
• People come first, before product and before
process
• Adaptation.
• Early and frequent value delivery.
• Customer collaboration.
• Control my cost ?

10. Beliefs
• People: competent, motivated, trusted, and
supported people will do well (self-organizing,
collaborative team)
• The customer. He Can’t pinpoint future needs
and wants, but they have a good handle on
what’s needed now
• The work. emergence, or evolution of plans

11. Principles
• People:

12. Principles
• Work:

13. Agile ?
• Software Development
• Project management
• Processes & methods
• Methodology or framework
• Paradigm, Mindset

14. Agile (Paradigm) Mindset
• Transcends Processes (People, Product,
Customer)
• the thinking that drives your actions
• Agile is a whole package to get its benefits for
people, product and customer.

15. Product With Agile Mindset
• Early and Frequent Delivery
• Value changes over time and context
• People should come first
• Collaborate with customer in trusting
relationship
• Technical Excellence, defer decisions (TDD)
minimize feedback loop by automated (Build,
test, deploy).

16. Product Without Agile Mindset
• Backlogs with detailed difficult specification
• People work in tasks, no collaboration
• Instead of getting feedback, prescribed
meetings
• Instead of servant leadership, task
management

17. Beyond Process (Ingredients)
• Beyond Best Practices (Recipes)
• You should be an Agile Chef

18. Logical Levels of Learning and Change
Robert Dilts’ “Logical Levels”
model

19. (according to the situation and
context)
Shu Ha Ri

20. Q & A
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