 Hello everyone. My name is Robert Piescianski. I'm part of ACI team in RedHead. I work as an agile practitioner and today I want to share a few things about my experience with change management, especially the things in areas where you can fail because these are the ones everyone loves the most. Before I start it, this is just what you can expect from today's sessions. 25 minutes of my long and boring monologue and then I left five minutes towards the end for your interesting questions. I think it's a first balance. We see how it works in the reality if you can fit in the time frames. Also if you have any questions, I know this can be more difficult in person and in reality on online meetings when you have computers and you can write it down, but try to remember them, write them down and ask them towards the end of the presentation and that's just because of the time frames and things I want to cover. I don't want to lose track and make sure we just go through all of the slides because they are all very interesting and important for the topic. Just a little more details about the areas I'm going to talk today. I'm going to share four examples with you of when I think people often fail when trying to introduce and embrace the change. It can be changed within the teams, but it can be as easy as like changing something in your life. You can connect it with different stories. I will do that through. I had actually four stories, but that was too long, so I cut it to three stories and one success story towards the end. We will talk about some indicators. What can I tell you? I might be doing this wrong. It's kind of early alarm bell for you. We're going to talk about how you can manage these challenges. I realize I'm not doing something which I should be doing. Is there something I can do to improve the situation? Then last but not least, what if I already did this and the whole situation happened? Is there any way how to reverse the process, how to improve it again? What is the best way to start the presentation? Is there any better way? The author of this quote is not that important, but I think the message here is really strong. It says, change may not always bring growth, but there is no growth without the change. If you just take a few seconds, everything about it and try to think about it from perspective of your professional life, but also your personal life, what really ships our lives? Are there changes or what we experienced? These are the things that probably build us as a person, as teams, if you think about those changes which happen to you and how they change you through your life. Was it changed that you planned ahead so you have a possibility to prepare yourself? Was the motivation coming from you? Or was it you just needed to adapt to external environment? Many times in life we face the situation when we can adapt or leave. If we go all the way back to theory of evolution, like organisms who could adapt best survive to new conditions. It is the same in life in work as well. If we manage to adapt to new circumstances, only the companies that can embrace the newest trends that come up with new ideas and can adapt to rapidly changing market requirements will be the most successful ones and everyone else will be just somewhere behind forgotten. From my work as an agile practitioner, I come into these situations quite a lot. I go to the teams introducing the changes. Sometimes my ultimate goal is to make this coming from the teams. If I can make the situation seem like it wasn't an idea from my side, but it was their own idea. That's a golden case scenario, which is very difficult to achieve, but I can see the trends in the people. That's why I separate people in terms of change management in the business. Can someone help me with the name of the cowboy? Woody. Thank you. If you don't know the toy story, I'm going to tell you a little bit more about them. The bus was always really positive. He was just going straight ahead to anything that stayed in his way. So optimistic, full of energy. Woody liked his comfort. He liked the old ways how everything was settled. There's a lot of prejudice in terms of IT world and how our people here in IT. Lots of people are saying that people here are conservative. They don't like the changes for the last five years. I'm trying to break down these opinions. I can see that people in IT, they actually, yes, they like the new things. Most of us probably do, but they also like to improve. That's why we're just working in the industry with the most intelligent people in the world. So it just hugely depends how you're going to introduce these changes and ideas. And a lot of people need to understand why we're going to do this. That's a super important part. And let's get to these few scenarios or stories, which I promise to share. First, I called, assuming to know everything and it happened to me. In this scenario, you don't necessarily need to be as, my friend has a golden retriever. So just for the sake of this scenario, I'm going to call him Charles. There is any Charles here? Don't be afraid, please. And I don't know, by looking at Charles, I don't think he has an idea of what he's doing. But in many terms, you can have someone with a years of experience, ton of knowledge. And it's easy to sleep in that word, thinking, I know what needs to be done. I'm not going to listen to anyone else. And this is how it's going to be. And that's not up to the discussion. And that's a very dangerous area where you can get yourself. First story. And it's from my personal experience. When I started on my first job as a scrum master, I had few experiences, like from working as a project management manager, managing people. But I was really motivated and really keen to make it work. That's why I started with some conversations with the director and other leadership. They said, we want to introduce scrum. I was like, yeah, perfect. I know scrum. No problem. I came to the team without even asking them what they think about it. What do they think they would prefer to do? We're going to do scrum. This is how scrum looks. Here are the ceremonies. Definition of done. Definition of ready. Here you go. Take it. It took us two months to implement everything. And I was super proud of myself. People doing this for years. I've done it in two months. Here you go. You're welcome. I can move on to a different team. You can probably imagine how it ended up. When I spoke with the team, after I realized, okay, I should probably console these people as well, they told me, yes, in JIRA and other tools, everything looked perfect. We had meetings in place. Cards were moving. On the meetings, we talked about cards. We updated the card. But the reality, everyone was doing exactly the same as they did before. But on the top of that, they were doing all of those new things. You can probably imagine that didn't end up so well. And now, I hope I'm a little bit wiser. So I know that at the beginning, it's important to just concentrate on the people, on this why and what you want to achieve, and build the bridges at the beginning. What I did here instead was if there were some bridges, I just destroyed them all and also pushed people to build really high walls between the sides of the river. It made it extremely difficult for me to come back to the team to gain the trust. I managed, but it was a huge setback. The important thing, our message from this one, if you're going to do any change within the team, within your household or something, just concentrate on everyone who's going to be involved. Don't rush it. Spend the time talking to people to make sure you really understand what is the situation about. And if you're going to go through this process, have people involved as much as possible, if you already did the same silly mistake as I did, then it's just going to take much more time to rebuild the trust, rebuild the relationships, but it's not impossible. We all people, we make mistakes, so don't be afraid to admit you made one and learn from it. Go ahead. Brings me to my next slide. I think one of the mistakes people do often, it's fear to fail. If you're an actor who knows he's going to die for certain in first series or first part of the movie, you probably don't fear anything and you can still be a great actor and successful. In the terms of us failing, I noticed two trends. Sometimes we want to be perfectionist, so we just fear that we're going to fail. That's why we don't start something. It can be at work at our own lives, like many people. Simple story about, well, after new year everyone wants to start with the gym, go to the diet, but they don't they don't start from the starting point where they are. They just want to get like all in at the beginning, having everything done in first week, so they do five sessions first week, eating just salad and chicken and lots of protein, and then they found out like they feel really tired and they found exercise that often they give up. So the sustainable pace is important as well as achievable goals, but in many cases we can also fear from being successful, because sometimes when we have such a good idea, and as it grows in our head and we introduce it to someone, and this is just how it starts to build up, it can be a really scary thing to like, if you get to that point, you know, it can really work. It can be a success. Then you're like, I never expected this. I probably can't take the responsibility, so I step away or just stop it now. I don't want to see this happening. I have another story for this one, and that goes all the way back to my university when I was writing my bachelor's thesis, and I thought, you know, I wanted to make it perfect. I knew I need to do it when I want to get my degree. So first six months I haven't written a single line. I had so many books, like you could read them probably for 10 years, so many resources. I've spoken to so many people, not a single line. Then a lot of stress came in because the deadline was coming closer, so I needed to really, really find, like, okay, if I don't hand over anything, I will fail for certain, but if I do at least something, maybe it will be good enough to be accepted, so I handed over the first version, then we improved it, and at the end I got A, but I would never get to that A version at the beginning. I needed to start it with something, some draft format. So how you can manage this situation? Within the teams, if we're going to talk about the concrete example now, it's concentrate on something achievable, something which is going to make a real difference. Sometimes we can call it minimum viable product, then build on that step by step, test it out if it's working great, continue, if it doesn't work, just move to something else. First mistake which I identified was that a lot of people don't spend enough time in building the relationships and identifying their early supporters. You can see maybe some connections from this first point with number one. The difference between those two for me, it's really like when you put most of your effort, because yes, you need to listen to people, but if you come to the situation, there's going to be always buzzes and woodies, and you need to find out what is the real situation in the team, because there can be really loud voices which can steer the mood towards one direction, and everyone can think like, oh this is really horrible, because everyone's saying just the negative things about this, but then if you ask people individually, you can find out the reality is totally different, and at the beginning, of course, if you're introducing a change, you want to talk to everyone, listen to everyone, but if there is a person who's just going to moan about it and criticize without any constructive feedback over and over, you just need to build a wall for certain time from those people and just concentrate really your energy and time to people who give you constructive feedback and who are willing to participate in this, that can really help you. This is the story which I needed to cut out, but it's going to be part of the success story at the end, but just to sum it up really quickly, this is quite straightforward. Some indicators might be that you're just driving all the change on your own, every idea it's coming from you, you need to chase people about doing things like nothing's coming from the team, you can manage it as I mentioned just by talking and listening to the people, if you already did it, you don't have this early support, like there's not a huge mistake, you can still build this team around you in any area that you need to manage the change in, it's just the sooner you start with building this team, the better. And last but not least, everyone's favorite, it's scope creeping. I like this meme because it just says, yeah, you can't scope creep if you don't have a scope. I heard from many teams that yeah this is great, we're going to do scrum or we're going to work in Kanban, that means like we don't have to have any plan, any commitment, we just do like every day I wake up, I do something, I might update the ticket, but you know if you ask me is it going to be done in a month, in two weeks? I'm working scrum, miracles happen, sometimes they happen, sometimes they don't serve. You just have to wait two weeks and you will see. So this is a big misunderstanding of some of the agile frameworks by people and I have one example from my life about scope creeping, I don't know about like how you did this, but me and my girlfriend, we go food shopping once a week, we just rarely do an online shopping and if I go shopping, like in many cases, I just finish the work, I don't have time to eat and we go shopping. We have a nice shopping list, you can imagine how it usually ends. If I'm hungry, I'm just going crazy, I buy everything and then I look back at that shopping list and half of the shopping list is not even covered, but we have like ten times as many things as we had on the shopping list originally. So the second scenario, it's imaging doing the same shopping when you are in the rush, so you're not hungry, but you just need to get it done quickly, then you end up with the different results as well. And ideal case scenario, when you eat enough, you have enough time, you have your list, all the time in the world, just go through the shop, all the patience in the world for me as well, because when I can't find something then I rather not have it. Then you get probably as close to your shopping list as possible. How it connects to our work, it's that if you implement the changes or trying to do some changes, always swing it in the bigger picture, because circumstances can influence the achievable scope, but also if you don't define this scope, that's like a big no-go number one, but the second one, what can influence your scope, it's some important releases coming up, or Christmas holiday, summer holiday, people will be on the vacation. So I probably don't want to do a massive change with the team in three weeks when half of the team or 70 percent, 90 percent won't be there with the release situation if we, if everyone's concentrating on the release and if you push into them like, okay can you make this decision and can we just introduce this to the team? You won't get the same results that you would get after that release, possibly. Okay, so just to try to wrap it up what I said so far, and when you're doing the changes, like everyone's going to make mistakes. You shouldn't be afraid to make them, that's how we learn. The best situation where you can get it's when you build an environment where people don't feel confident to share those mistakes, then if you manage to build this trust and good relationships, you have a really good foundations for making any changes, successful, because it's a different, big, big difference, making a change and make a successful change. If it's coming from the people, you're getting regular feedback, you're just setting yourself towards the right direction to make it right. And considering the feedback, not everyone feels confident to share the feedback straight away. Speak in the meeting where we have 20, 30 people, some people are just, you know, think it might not be that important, certain different reasons why people won't share feedback, so try to find as many feedback loops as possible. Talk to people, but at the same time retrospectives are a great idea how to get feedback from the teams. You can do different surveys, like more feedback you can get, of course, there is a balance. If you're going to ask people the same questions every two weeks, you're going to get the same answers and then you won't get any answers probably because they will just get annoyed. But if you can find a good balance in this, then you can really get a lot out of it. And I promised you a success story, so does anyone know this guy? Yes? Yeah, yeah, well done here. So exactly, this is Craig Ramsey and he's from Canada. He's ice hockey coach right now for the national team of Slovakia. But he, before, he was a coach in an agile, like the biggest achievement probably you can do as a ice hockey coach. And then he came to this little country with five million people as a head coach. And he exactly, like I think this is one of my favorite change managers after Ted Lasso probably. He didn't come there like, you know, I'm the expert from NHL and this is what you need to do to be successful. He really spent a lot of time to get to know people in Slovakia, the ice hockey federation, everyone around, and then he showed them his vision and he was trying to make it their own vision. It was super complicated at the beginning. There was a lot of pushback but I think right now he proved after five, six, seven years that it's really working and he managed to make great results with our team. He was also not afraid to experiment. So when he thought like, okay, this is what can work and he just found it, we don't have the place for this. So he shifted other direction. This is something again with a relation to the ice hockey story. If you don't like ice hockey, I apologize for too many connections. And this is something, I don't know, probably many people said it before but this came out during my consultation with one of the colleagues from Redhead about the changes and I feel like, oh, this is a brilliant idea. We need to have this in the presentation. Success can slow down the change and it's so true. Don't confuse a short-term success for the state where you want to be and sometimes another collaboration with Slovakia and ice hockey, we were in a real decline and then in 2012 we went second in the International Cup. Everyone knew that what we are doing with young people, how we're supporting the clubs and everything, that it's not working but after this everyone was like, it's working somehow, like we got second, how other we could get second. It can be same in the work, like if you deliver project on the time or if you just managed to get that release done and it means, you know, your whole team spent two last two weeks working 20 hours a day just to have it done and then at the end of the day you can't say just yet, we did it, it's working, we don't need to change anything. Always think further ahead and the broader context and that gets us to the end of the presentation and to your questions if you have any. So I think it can do both, it can complement but in like pure theory these roles go against each other if you look at the pure definitions and for me that was what's like pushed me towards the agile direction because I really enjoyed the project management from the beginning, just like good to, I like to work with people, communicate with people but there was a lot of business site on the top of that, tracking the deadlines, checking the budget constantly. In many cases it was about making pressure on the people like, you know, we need to get this done and then call them again like, are you working on this and chasing people or this is something completely different from me in the terms like I can really get close to the people and instead of saying to them, you know, I need you to get this done by tomorrow, like I spoke with customer, it's if we don't get it done we don't get the project then. Here you can really come to the team and get the insights from them. What do you think we can improve? I have a lot of knowledge, everyone in the similar role probably has but when you come to the team, every single team, you can learn something different. I think that's what those the most beautiful part with the projects you just know this stress like you need to get the project at the beginning. Once you get the project everyone calms down because yes, we got the project and then the second stressful phase is like we need to deliver this first part so that's when you're pushing everyone but this is like smoother continuous process and much more about people not about that business side, that's what I love about this. Are there any other questions? I think it differs a lot in redhead from what I know. If you say agile practitioner sometimes it can mean someone works with the team on daily basis and sometimes just this person works with the whole organization, sometimes this person can take more from the project management, sometimes it's more about training, coaching so in redhead I think which is great that everyone in this role can evolve as they would like to and if I compare it with other companies I worked for the company when they saw for example agile coach or scrum master, someone does a manager as well and we had a lot of conversations about it and they saw this role more of someone like managing and tracking the project rather than working with people but I was probably lucky because many companies I worked for have exactly like understand the role exactly the same as I do and this is important for me when I was doing the interviews or something like if I know that we have the same definition and we understand the same things under the role that we can collaborate, yes? So it's about learning from the past and gathering some data so if you want to learn if you're improving you should have it back up with some data and then if you have those trackers then you can compare it like you know we just we haven't changed anything and we did this really great but if you can see the similar tense scenarios from the past you did really bad then you can say okay this was just one time success and if you can see the strength like sometimes you can find out from the data that no we just got really successful in this area and we never we never changed anything like what happened and you might find out you know we just someone from the team started to act differently with the customer or customer just hired someone else to communicate with the team like it can be a lot of factors but as long as you have some data to look at and compare it then you can say is it a trend is it just one time thing okay yes that's a difficult one I I think what can help a lot it's that starting point because in many most of the cases when I go to the team it's like we don't want you here we don't want to hear from you just don't tell us about your own confluence or scrum we know how to do our job and leave us alone if you can show people that your job really it's to help them to improve their daily life and you can make a lot of things easier for them that can help you with the resistance so building those relationships but at the same time sometimes you can identify some quick wins for the team one of the I can think of it's like a lot of teams working under a lot of pressure because many software companies have limited resources a lot of customers so there's a pressure on the team to deliver fast and if you don't have a process behind it then just you end up sooner or later burning out because you try to break on everything you're just jumping from topic to topic but if you can put some system that can really protect the team from this burnout and that they can prioritize things or it can show it it can be a really good sign for the company but for the team themselves as well understand them but also build those relationships because then like resistance coming comes a lot of time just from people not knowing what to expect and then we just our natural tendency is like I don't know what to expect from this so I'm just gonna push back because someone's just gonna you know impact my safe space environment and I don't want that person to do that if you show people that that's not the case but you're just here to help them to build that word with them you might be subjective is the original walkers okay so I'm maybe start with the redhead because in redhead I never ever dealt with something like this and I had the different challenges in terms of leadership was like you know do whatever you want but I'm gonna support it but I'm not gonna push people because it's up to the people and sometimes just you need to make the decisions you will sooner or later you come to the point when you need to make a decision especially if you deal with a larger group of people you can have the endless conversations I don't have the direct experience like with leadership not supporting it but I have experience when leadership was supporting it but what they actually meant was you know we want to do this because then you know everyone every single developer can book all their time on the geratic kit and we can build the customers based on that we can track their progress so that was a different fight but I still needed to have this fight and I think it was equally difficult conversation and then it's just you just need to again I try to use the data in most of the scenarios that I can and I show them the projects from the past like you know why you failed in those projects like I have messages from the teams and feedback why they think we failed and this is what we can improve but if you're gonna do this we try always also you can try it with the team like if you even know it's a nonsense you can try just to prove and have the data for I don't know if that answered your question you know on which students it's also important because yeah if a broken process makes somehow makes more money that's kind of a hard thing to go against it's like good luck to this and come in to make less volunteer to improve something else the other thing that I'll keep wondering about maybe I can catch you up here about is when the grounds persistence aren't completely clear it's just a no so that's very difficult one and I would say if it's just a no then the problem it's somewhere like much more deeper and you just need to dig into it or higher I meant like in terms of deeper like you know it's just no one just says purely no there has to be some reasons and unless you know these reasons because how the collaboration from my perspective like how I can collaborate with someone who just you know says no with any reason yeah I'm happy to catch up after the talk and but in general yeah in some cases you know you might just need someone from outside to help the resolve the situation because there are many scenarios when like the trust has been broken already and no one from within can rebuild it so you just need someone from outside who can look at it with fresh eyes and just help people to manage through this difficult situation yes yeah thank you for sharing that can but you don't always have the luxury to share but of course it's kind of like if you can share it with people and make the decision and involve more people in the decision that can help as well yeah I'm just getting the straight signal that we done so thank you very much