 Hello everyone, welcome to this talk on the future of work by Patricia Kong. Patricia Kong is the head of Enterprise and Data Set Solutions at Scrum.org. Scrum.org being the home of Scrum. I'll let her take it away from here and enjoy the talk. We have 20 minutes together and it's my pleasure to be with you today from rainy Boston, Massachusetts in the US. I have 20 minutes, actually 18 minutes, maybe 17 minutes now. So I'm going to be moving quickly through some material that I've been thinking about at Scrum.org and hopefully have a short time for some Q&A afterward with you. So the future of work, what does success look like? And this question has been something that I've been exploring at Scrum.org for a while in the agile space, especially when we think about the enterprise and organizations and leadership. So things that we understand at the team level to be great, what does that mean when we look at the organization? So at Scrum.org I head up Enterprise Solutions and Leadership. I've been here for a while. Scrum.org is the home of Scrum. It's founded by Ken Schwaver, who is the co-creator of the Scrum framework. Scrum's been around for over 20 years, so hopefully it's not a new thing that I'm talking about. There's a lot of things about me here that's not the important part, but know that I do a lot of research and development on enterprise solutions from the agile perspective and a lot of that is founded in organizational behavior. So what Scrum.org does really well and how we think about these things to help improve organizations is we think about community. So we have training and education. You may be familiar with their assessments and certification that's really made up of the community at large, which includes you. And it also has our group trainers. So when March came around and there was COVID, this is us, not all of us, but this is several of us, professional Scrum trainers and Agilist of Light coming together and say, how do we work now in this world? And it's something that six, seven months down the line, we're still here thinking about these things. And it's interesting because the notion of success and the notion of going forward and moving forward has been something that I've been really researching for five years. And it's still relevant now even more than ever. So if you've heard me talk about evidence-based management or you're familiar with that through Scrum.org, I'm going to be explaining very, very shortly the notion of the framework and the genesis of it and how we think about it. But I have something new for you because actually, as of yesterday, we've released an update to the EVM guide. So this is my first time publicly and I do a lot of talks and teaching and I'm on social media, but this is the first time I'm announcing it that there's an update to the EVM guide. And what that means is that we're going to be offering the ability for people to assess themselves through certification and assessment. And I'll talk about that right at the end. It's not the important part. But there's some new stuff that I'm going to be showing today, which is nice to be able to share with you guys. So when we think about Agile and what's coming up, there's usually now more than ever this notion of we've been doing Agile for a long time. How do we know that that's better? How do we know that we're being successful? And what's interesting is right now, even when we think about in moments of COVID, in June, I think this year, McKinsey had found through their research that organizations that had Agile embedded into their operational model, their business model, have been able to pivot better. So that begs the question of people coming and saying, well, are we Agile? How is that? How is that going? What does that look like? And really what that means is they're thinking about how am I spending my money and what am I getting back from it? And where do we need to put our money right now? Because every single dollar counts, right? And so we're feeling that wherever you are in the organization, there's this feeling of justification. I know that Scrum Masters are coming out and saying, they're trying to figure out if we need Scrum Masters on this Scrum team anymore, right? And, you know, we might be talking to management and executives and saying, we need to now try to move faster and pivot faster and adapt all those words that mean Agile faster than ever. So what's going on with the teams that we have, right? How are they doing? And when we think about teams, this is what we think about, right, these fun teams, and we want to make sure they're better than that. But guess what that means to the manager? All they see is that, and this is what they think about, right? So that's nice that the employers are happy. But what are we getting out of that? And the thing is, is that it's because when we look at, when we look at those pictures like this really, right? When we look at that, we start to think about, oh, we have that happy image. And what we start to report is, you know, our velocity is this, our other metrics are around these different things are all output metrics, right? They're all things that we've produced. And when there's that disconnect, what the business is looking for is what value is that actually delivering, right? So we might have some behavior, some great behavior, some great performance that come out of the teams. But how do we connect that to actually the question of, are we achieving value not only from a money perspective, but also from the customer perspective of our customers are coming back to us. And if they want something else, or if they want to try something else, we can try that, we can do that quickly. So we have to think about this notion of what agility really means, right? So agility stalls when our goals aren't aligned, right? So we're only thinking about operational goals, but business is thinking about another goal, or management or people in another country are thinking about another goal, we're supposed to work with those people, and we're not talking the same language. It's just going to be like this, right? It's just like any relationship, any connection. And that's really big when we think about this notion of transformation, right? So companies being transformed, but only like one part is being transformed. Oh, we're being transformed, but we actually don't even understand, you know, why we're doing that. That's important. So there's three things that you want to start thinking about that I'll just tell you right off the back when we think about success, right? So the focus is, I've talked about it a lot, this notion of value, what do we think about when we're trying to understand value? The other thing that I've also brought up is this notion of goals. And you've heard me say it, it's outcomes, the third thing. So if we think about outcomes, right, what does that mean when we're looking for a change in behavior? What are we actually measuring that shows that we have a change in behavior, change in outcome? The reason that I use the word behavior here, I used to talk about outcomes is because when we talk about measuring to understand, to have something real, transparent about how we're doing, is that what you measure will affect the behavior of the people that are measuring and doing the measuring, that are measured and being measured, right? And that will be more aligned if we have focus on the same goals. So there's four areas when we talk about evidence-based management that we can look at when we're talking about measurement, right? So first is this current value. Where are you now? Unrealized value is what's out there? What are some other things that we can be pursuing? Are they worth pursuing? I'm doing this on purpose and you'll see why. So we understand the market and we want to measure those things of value. What is our capability to actually do that? So if you see on the bottom two screens, I talk about that as time to market and ability to innovate. So when you look at these four things holistically, if you're thinking, oh, we always get drilled on time to market, we're too slow, you have a misconception, the organization has a misconception, somebody has a misconception of time to market. Time to market is how fast are you able to get feedback and learn from that feedback? Ability to innovate is what are the things that are holding you back from being able to try to produce those new things? What is holding the customer back from actually able to absorb that new stuff, right? Think about these different in these different ways. And you see at the bottom, there's a link to the evidence-based management guide. There's a very succinct definition of each one of these things, questions that you should be thinking about each one of these key value areas. And there's also measurements in the appendix for each one of these that you can look at. What's important to me is that you are able to consider these things holistically, right? So if we just think about images, current value, I want you to think about the customers, the outcomes. Why are they using the things that you produce? What makes them happy? What makes them unhappy? What is actually driving behavioral difference? What would they want? Again, that unrealized value. What is that gap that you could try to close? Can you do it and learn quickly? What does that time look like? And actually, are you trying to fix all the technical debt or all these other things that are holding you back? What does that look like? That innovation question, right? This is the image that I have in my mind when I think about innovation. What are those things that need to be fixed first? And how would they affect each other? So that was a quick run through key value areas. Again, evidence-based management guide, you can look through that. What I want to talk and share with you guys is the new things that we've been thinking about. So let me take you a step back. So when we were looking at evidence-based management from Scrum.org, it originally was called the Continuous Improvement Framework. And that was probably about maybe even seven years ago. And organizations were not there. A lot of organizations were not there to enable to embrace this whole notion of improvement, continuous improvement. They were thinking about how do I scale agile? How do I make everything bigger? How do we do this? And we said, well, if you want to do that, you need to think about this improvement question. But the big thing is, if you're trying to do that, you're going to spend a lot of money on these transformations, et cetera. You need something to inspect and adapt. We're talking about empiricism. And so we've been looking at that, and we've been talking about these key value areas. And that's been helpful to an extent. And now what I've found is, is that in the past three years or so, at least working with clients, when we've been doing a lot of EVM work, is that the thing that always struggled was this notion of transparency is the broad spectrum. But what are you actually inspecting? And so, again, that really comes back to this notion of, are you inspecting just output, things that you've created, or activity, things that we just do? Or are you actually looking at that value and looking at the outcomes and the behaviors that we're trying to change and improve for our customers? Outcome. So if you think about, when I talk about value, activity could be like, you're riding a bike, output could be, I rode a bike one mile. The outcome could be, I now have a bike that I can ride and I can go to the supermarket and get my groceries instead of walking, so it doesn't take me one hour. It takes me now only 30 minutes. When you think about those things and understanding value, now you're starting to say, hey, these are interesting, I have a fuller picture, but why are we doing these things? And that's what you're going to see as an update in the evidence-based management. I'm in a basement right now. Evidence-based management guide to really use measurement, use something tangible to try to improve and create a more agile organization so that we can achieve more value. So what I have here is there's a breakdown that we've included of how you can think about goals. The whole continuous improvement notion, whereas an industry are ready to go back in here, because again, if we're investing, hopefully we're investing toward these goals that we care about as an organization. For you, wherever you are, thinking about strategic and intermediate goals, the question that I would have is, are you aware of these? So we're doing all these things to improve. Maybe we measure ability to innovate and we improve those things, but wouldn't it be great if we knew why? Because maybe it's more important to look at something else of how we could be saving or investing our money differently. So when we talk about evidence-based management and thinking about goals, there's this notion of strategic goal and intermediate goals, understanding where you start. So you've started where you are in your current state because you started somewhere. Now, when you're thinking about these goals, you want to be running experiments. This could be your running experience. This could be, these are our releases, but understand where you're trying to goal. So if we think about a strategic goal, think about where we are right now, right? Let's just say there's a huge pandemic. And we could argue about what is our goal? And some people might say, the goal is to get a vaccine and vaccinate everyone. I would say that that's the intermediate goal. Your strategic goal is we need to get rid of this disease or stop people from getting sick and dying from it, right? So when we think about that way, it's the steps that we need to take to try to achieve that goal. That's our star. That's what we're trying to do in real life, well, not in real life because we are in real life, but in work. That goal may flex, it may move depending on what we learn as we get there. So I have a couple more minutes left and I've thrown tons of information at you. When we think about the outcome of what we do and people say, oh, we're going to do Scrum and Agile, I find that it's a good time to just remind them that there's three reasons why we do that because we're trying to increase business value, decrease non-value, adding waste and manage risk exposure. Scrum and Agile, Scrum especially, it doesn't solve anything for you. It puts these boundaries in place. And what I hope for evidence-based management is that we say the things that we're doing, let's gather that evidence. Let's gather the information that we have so that we can together move in a more aligned way. And so when I again talk about those three things, when we're focusing on success, think about the value of what you're doing. Think about when you're measuring, how is that affecting the behavior? Are you measuring just, are you being reported? Are you asked to be reporting on just progress, just output? There's information there that is valuable, but if we want to make that connection to value, then we want to connect outcomes to it. And obviously, think about the goals of why you're doing something. What is that aspirational thing that the organization is doing and does that line up to everywhere in the organization so that we are investing correctly, so that there's not something happening here, but I'm diverging and going over there. Power perspective of people is something that underlines all of this, but I don't have time to talk about that today. We can always talk about that another time, but there's this notion of when we think about tangibly, if we measure things that are going on value, what are the other things in a system that will be affected? And how do those things struggle? So who are the people? Do we think about their perspectives? What is the status and power struggle that we have that usually just holds things back? How can we look at those things? The first way is to just talk and have a central point of fact and truth, which would be evidence. So all of that, here are some quick tips if you want to get started in thinking about these things. Are you set up for success? So question for you, do you align your spring goals to greater goals? How do you do that if you do? What about your product? What about your product backlog? So if you can start going into those conversations, you can think about if you wanted to achieve those things. What key value areas do you need to improve? Take a look at that and say, you know what, we need to improve here. Here's a measurement that we can start inspecting and use evidence-based management holistically to do that. So recommended resources for you guys. This is some different places on scrim.org that you can look. We do have things on, you know, even portfolio management, but take a look at the evidence-based management guide. I actually just published it yesterday and I have not told a soul outside scrim.org. So I will be in the booth. I think Harry is back on, but you can always connect with me on LinkedIn, ask me questions there, or go find me in the booth. I'll probably be around for a little bit, but enjoy the rest of your conference. I think I have some time for Q&A. Yes, Patricia, you do. And thanks a lot for that informative talk. The participants, I'd encourage you to go to the right-hand side and look at the discus panel there. And in that, in the Q&A tab, please do post your questions to Patricia so she can address them. And like she mentioned, you can always interact with her in the networking booths and in her booth also. There is a networking session dedicated, which is 30 minutes post this. I strongly recommend you get into a lobby and get a seat and have face-to-face interactions with other speakers also. And before I leave you, please do remember to go to the polls section and answer the polls if at all you can give us some feedback on how the stock went. So over to you, Patricia. Unless I'm looking at this incorrectly, I don't see any Q&A. So I think that that might be it for me today. Yeah, let's give it a minute. Participants might just come back. See a ton of thumbs up at the good sign. All right. Well, I'm really excited that I got it. It was quite short, but shorter than I'm used to. So I know it was a lot of information. Take some time to digest. And again, that EBM guide is free. It's available to everyone on scrum.org. I put the link in the talk. And there are some different ways that you can start to see and learn more about what we're thinking. And that would be through something called the Agile Measurement Open Assessment, which is free. And then our forecast is to be launching an EBM, Evidence-Based Management Certification and Assessment in the next month or two. So keep your eyes open for those things. That's great. What do you mean by power? Status. And not status just by where you are in the organization. It's about power in terms of acquiring political power, almost. So it doesn't mean that you're just the boss. It might be the person that kind of knows all the information because they've been at the same role or organization for 10, 20 years. And when you think about that, how does that meld with when we're trying to make progress? When we talk about things like bottom-up intelligence, it gets filtered out because people who are empowered don't think that it makes them uncomfortable. You know, how does that work? But there's a larger dynamic when we go there. But for short, I mean status. Thank you again. And this was a really great talk. And thanks to the participants for joining. Enjoy the rest of the conference. Thanks. Enjoy the rest of the conference. Bye-bye.