 Welcome everyone to the Journey Towards Autonomous Teams, a Coaches to Kit by Yashashree Barway, Senior Consultant, Data Consultancy Services. Without any further ado, over to you Yashashree. Thank you once again for this opportunity and I'm very happy to be here today. Good afternoon, good morning based on where you are in the part of the world. This is basically to share my experience report in taking agile teams on to their autonomy journey. This session is about some of the teams that I have been coaching and how moving into an autonomy experiment happened with them and what we learned out of those. It's a very close to heart subject because agile coaches are basically supposed to be helping teams to take them on to the autonomy journey. I took this journey along with my teams and the coaches that were working with me. So thanks to the teams and the coaches that I'm here to share this experience report to me. Looking forward to share, know what we have learned over this journey. I think the introduction part is done. So thank you Jitendra for saving me some seconds. And I just wanted to call out that, you know, my book Agile Mindset Magic has a lot of stories that I have gathered through my experience as an Agile coach. And even today's session is basically a story that I wanted to share from my experience over last, I think almost a year, right? And that journey also started with last year's Agile India Conference and I'll talk about it a bit later. This particular story, today's story basically is from an internal IT group of a customer organization that I work with. And it is basically about the teams that I have been working with, right? So this particular customer organization has been on the Agile journey for quite some time, at least for last three, four years. And what we observed is that these teams have been scoring themselves low on autonomy in their email survey often, like for a very long time, right? So of course this was a topic of interest for coaches and we wanted to actually help the teams. We started thinking about, you know, how do we help the teams to move better, to be better in terms of autonomy and that's where this whole experience started. So I want to cover this in four sections very, very quickly. This is a short one. So why it mattered, what it is and what were the kind of workshops that we did, the toolkit that we used and also some of the experiences that we got through this. All right, so why autonomy is something that we started discovering as we started talking to the teams. And of course, if you remember from the Scrum Guide, one of the main things that the Scrum Guide talks about is Scrum team is self-managing, which means that they internally decide who does, what, when and how. And of course, coaching the team in self-management is one of the main responsibilities of the Scrum Master and as well as, you know, the agile coach that works with that particular team. So we started talking to the team members, right? And one of the things that we realized is that what exactly autonomy is in itself had varied opinions within the team members. Well, forget about the team members. Even within the coaching community, we had different perspectives of how we want to address autonomy in teams. And what does it mean? And how does it help the teams? And how do we really try to figure out whether the team is feeling autonomous? If yes, why? If not, why? So that itself was a lot of different opinions that we had within the coaching community. So they started our journey to understand it better and learn from various sources better and then take it to our teams and then learn it along with them as well. One of the sources that really helped us was basically the ScrumBooks.org. So ScrumBooks.org has a lot of patterns that can be used very well by the Scrum Masters and the coaches. So when we started looking at the way they address autonomous teams, we figured out that they basically focus on two things, right? One is, is the team able to establish their own culture? And secondly, it was about how the team carries out their work. Are they autonomous enough to carry out their work? And they believe that the Scrum Masters or the coaches are definitely somebody who work like a firewall to basically fend off any external pressures that the teams are getting from the business or from other stakeholders or any other organizational forces. So this definitely meant that we as coaches had to really start taking this to the teams and try and ensure that they understand what autonomy is and what is hindering them basically, right? So they started the journey and then we started looking at a lot of work that various thought leaders have done in the industry defining autonomy. It of course had to start with Daniel Pink's drive. One of the most celebrated books, I'm sure all of us would really appreciate in terms of the autonomy. Daniel Pink considers autonomy to be one of the three most important pillars of intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers. He says autonomy is basically the desire to govern our own lives and decide our own paths without the dominance of others. That was a very important and very relevant definition that many people could relate to. And then we also started looking at the 40 framework that Daniel has, which is basically task, time, team and techniques. He talks about how autonomous teams can choose the tasks that they work on. They can choose the time they work for as well as they choose the team that they work for, work with, and also they can choose the techniques on how they want to do their work. This was really a very, very good input to establishing the understanding of autonomy within the teams. And when we took it to the teams, and of course, there were a lot of seniors and some managers and leaders, who would always have questions about what happens when the team is autonomous, if the team can do what they want to do, how do, what is the control that exists as an organization, or how do we ensure that the team is on the same lines of what the organization wants as objectives and so on. So they're actually, of course, this was a very, very valid point, right? Like are we saying that autonomous teams are teams that can simply do whatever they want, whatever way they want? If you remember, one of the times Kent Beck said that autonomy without accountability is simply like vacation. And that is not something that we were looking at definitely. And that's where one of the things that was very relatable to our leaders and managers was the concept of aligned autonomy. And this is what Henrik Thieberg really brings out very beautifully in his engineering culture at Spotify videos, which talks about how autonomous teams when aligned are really purpose-driven and they really bring out the best to take the organization's objectives to the end, right? So this concept resonated very well with a lot of our senior stakeholders. So aligned autonomy is something that basically attempts to balance the autonomy of a team to perform the work so that it is aligned to the objectives of the organization. A very, very powerful concept, which resonated very well. In last year's Agile India, as I was mentioning, right? I was very fortunate to hear Dan Nord's talk and his talk was basically Agility at Skillets available on YouTube. And he spoke about meeting of two mindsets and while I was working on this autonomy piece, I happened to hear this talk and I really felt that it was a godsend because whatever he proposed really helped me to formulate the abstract concepts that we have on autonomy into something concrete that I can take to teams and we can start evolving that further. He spoke about six dimensions that he believed are very relevant for autonomy, skills and capabilities, resources, authority, purpose, constraints and accountability. And this was of course very well aligned with the aligned autonomy concept as well. So in an enterprise, if we want to really scale Agility, how all of these six dimensions can help. Very beautiful talk, I'll really highly recommend and I have also attached a link to his talk last time. He brought in case there are any gaps, so like for example, if we find that any dimension is getting a skill oneself, a reskill oneself or so on. For example, if it is harder to obtain, probably we should borrow some or we should probably hire some skills or anything that is needed basically to make the team autonomous. And if we feel that if it is impossible to obtain, then probably we should simply just de-prioritize. So a lot of these concepts are very relevant to the work that we were doing and we took a lot of these insights together and experimented those with our teams. And every time we experimented with our team, every time any coach experimented with the teams, we learned more. We learned from the experience of the workshops and we also learned from what the teams said, right? And we could evolve the way we were bringing autonomy to the teams for their understanding better. So I would want to share the kind of workshop model that we use with all of you. So I modeled it on the GROW model that we use for coaching, which is basically goal, reality, options and will. So the goal of the workshop is basically taking the autonomy journey for the team. So the team is already on their agile transformation. How do they take their autonomous status or autonomy quotient, if you will, to the next level? The second aspect is reality. And this is where we used a toolkit that was based on the various work that we just saw from the various thought leaders. We put it together in a toolkit so that we could kind of baseline where the team feels they are in their autonomy journey. Then look at the options based on the various liquidity strategy then move on to the will part, which is basically the improvement backlog and how do they want to take it ahead and so on. I'll very quickly talk about the toolkit that we used in the base learning of dimension. So this is of course just a sample from the toolkit that we used. So I can share if any of you are interested more information about the workshop as well as the complete toolkit that we used. So what we had was we had four dimensions, skills and capabilities, resources, authority and purpose as the first column. And for each of these dimensions, we created some questions to start making the team think about where they are in terms of that particular dimension in their journey. So the coach would basically facilitate this whole discussion, would take each dimension, each question within the dimension, look at how, what are the examples that the team can code with respect to that particular question. The team will also discuss how, what is the alignment that is needed or expected out of them. So like for example, the skills and capabilities, if the question is, the team has all the skills and capabilities within so that they can independently deliver working software and some examples given, they will have to align to the capabilities that are defined by the organization they are part of. Also there will be some constraints. So call out those constraints and whatever you see here are examples, but the whole idea is to trigger the thought process within the team and the team can also say, this is our constraint or something else is our constraint and so on. So in this case, the constraints could be learning options, availability, right? Like some of the organizations may give options to learn, upskill, reskill, some may not. So that would be a constraint, availability of people to be staffed. Some may have budgets, some may not have budget and so on. And then accountability, like what is accountability that team will have with respect to the dimension that we are talking about? So in terms of skills and capabilities, autonomous teams will have accountability to identify what is the skill or capability needed depending upon whatever is their product roadmap or any technological changes that have happened. So they will have to identify and raise impediments early and often as needed, right? So that will be their accountability. And we also called out some techniques that the teams can use to improve the question that is being discussed. So the coach will basically facilitate this discussion to chart out what is the reality and the team will score themselves, right? So the team will say, yeah, we are doing good here, we are not doing good there and so on. And then the options will be discussed based on the liquidity strategy. So pick up the lowest rated dimension, talk about what can be done to make it better and so on. And then of course, finally, the will, which is what out of all of these things that have been discussed is the team willing to do. Are there any impediments that they would want outside of the team to come back and actually start resolving? So that will be the will part of it to bring closure to whatever discussion have happened. So this is the kind of workshop and the toolkit that we used and I'll be very happy to share and learn from any of you who are ready to experiment with this because we had a discussion in the coaching community and we saw really a lot of variations of these toolkit and some of the coaches also took it to evolve it to a different level altogether, coming up with some kind of definitions in terms of the maturity level and so on. So this, I mean, I can't let you to share it with anybody that needs. Very quickly talking about the experiences, right? Which is something that I wanted to share from a couple of teams we experimented this with. Just two teams for the sake of time. So one team is, which was relatively at early stage and we had to spend a lot of time in discussing and getting on the same page with respect to what is autonomy with them. The second team was at a relatively mature stage. So there we could actually use the toolkit and we could baseline where the team feels they are in terms of their autonomy journey. So for the team, the coach facilitated this discussion and we had very good comments from the teams to understand what is autonomy? Why is it important and how does it look like if they are an autonomous squad? And then based upon that, there was a shared alignment built in when the coach brought in the lot of thoughts or insights that we just saw in the first two sections on what the thought leaders are talking about in terms of autonomy. And that really was helpful to the team. Whereas in team two, they could actually relate to a lot of concepts and also the dimensions and they could look at all of these dimensions and see, yeah, we needed skill. We could scale ourselves. So we are really autonomous in that case. We are doing good there. Or we don't have the right access because of the compliance issues. We can do better there in terms of having being autonomous. So this was a very rewarding experience, very thought provoking experience for us and it actually helped us in many ways. So definitely the scores on autonomy and team health increased. We could take the suggestions, the improvement opportunities as well as impediments to a larger organization to be solved, right? Something that was not under the team's influence. We could take it there and better handling of those impediments happened. And sharing of this with the community led to evolution of this particular toolkit further. And different variations that were suited for different teams that actually helped them to be better and more autonomous. So that's what I had to share. So thank you for being patient and listening in. And as I mentioned earlier, I would be very happy to share the toolkit as well as the workshop format that we used with any of you. You can mail me or you can connect with me on LinkedIn. Chitendra, I don't know, I think I crossed the time. Thank you very much. This was an exciting session, Yashushri. Thanks everyone for joining this great session and thanks a lot, Yashushri, for this wonderful session. Thank you very much. Thank you for the opportunity.