 and I work in the agile practice team led by Jane Krieger and I'm really happy to see so many of you because like you know it's been like all people stand up and left so it's great to see that some people came as well alright so I've been to several agile talks here and it seems like they are doing the similar vein of speaking so I'm gonna follow the same way I am not going to talk about like stand-ups and that they should be on the 15 minutes and stuff like that so I'm terribly sorry if you are expecting that because I'll be disappointed in you what I will be talking about is going to be my personal experience with one agile team over the past nine months I have been working with them so I'm gonna talk about people I'm not talking about the way we work but I'll try to explain who are the people we work with and what do they do on daily basis and the team is the modularity team so who was here on Friday did you all get the modularity sticker and now a trick question did you put it on your laptop the correct way good one I wanted to give you some more but unfortunately Adam took them all away because they are precious so I'm sorry alright so this is the team we have got about 14 people on a team which is quite a lot and I'm including the people who are our stakeholders on a team intentionally as well because we talk to them on on quite regular basis so this is the team we have got six engineers who are facing inside of that team we have got additional four different roles which are kind of sitting on two chairs really we are like inside of the team but we also have to deal with stuff which is outside and then we have got two stakeholders who kind of don't really work with the team on daily basis but we need to talk to them anyway because they are very important for us and what I'm gonna do now is that I'm gonna go person by person and I'm gonna introduce them to you our great product manager perfect he by the way wears glasses you know alright so what does he do on daily basis well this guy is very busy because he is overlooking about six different products across the rail department so most of his time he's sitting on meetings meetings meetings he's having discussions with various different people so when he's got time he reaches emails as well so it's a very very difficult person to get in touch with because he's just very busy with not only us we would love to have one product manager for like our team but that's not possible we have to share him though right so what does he bring to the team very important thing is that he's for us the guy who is presenting the customer's view he's the one who brings in the business requirements based on which we kind of decide what we are gonna do he's the one who owns the PRD so that's the requirement document and he is the one we discussed with the priorities of the project okay so what he brings to us but like what can we give to him well it's easy we have to guarantee that we will give give back the work he asked for right so this is something the team needs to commit to also he expects from us that like when he comes up with these like business requirements we come back with some like engineering propositions on how we are gonna fix that or how we are gonna implement it in a new tool so it's like yeah pretty good understanding next one team lead he kind of looks like that too already so yes that's a guy who is actually like doing a lot of work for the team so not only that he's talking outside with other teams but he needs to make sure that everybody on a team is happy so what does he do every day he's kind of there to support the team members so people come to him with questions and he's trying to like either point them to the right people or point them to the right direction or help them he's also the guy who is discussing with architects and also the product manager but he's also the guy who needs to make sure that we have got all our work well recorded in cards and that they are reviewed and that we all know where to find that okay so what does he do to us with respect of like what can how can we benefit from that role well he's the one who is keeping the team focused and on the right track so he's the one who understands what we are doing and he's the one who is telling us hey we cannot do this because this doesn't correspond to the tool we are developing so we have to do something else today also you know the team is getting from the outside a vision but we don't work on a vision we work as engineers on on tasks right on features or on improvements and the team lead is there to help us to set up these tasks which you engineers can work on okay so what he needs well first of all he meets from the outside of the team a list of project requirements he needs to know what we should be doing right that's clear but inside of that team he needs to know that the team is committed to deliver in a high quality so he cannot go to each engineer I thought we have like six he cannot come to each of them and like talk to them separately on like daily or hourly basis because we are distributed team that's not possible so he needs a commitment from the team that team is going to deliver a good quality work and that they know what they are doing and if they don't that they just become subject matter experts we have to a girl and a guy we have good more girls on the team than just me all right so we have got two different type of subject matter experts but they both work for us for 50% so we have to share them and that's not easy one of our subject matter experts is a person who is also a people manager so like she has to distribute her time between different projects but also between different people and makes it makes it difficult because we go out to these guys and we ask them questions these guys are the ones who tell us hey you know you are doing this and you're using this technology I'm expert in so hey let's do it this way because that's the best way you can you can use it so also very busy people what do they do how they help the team well they help the team that they talk to us about the subject they are experts in so like when we have to do something in a certain way and actually not too many people in a tree knows that have that experience or expertise they are here to help us to develop it and of course they help us to also use the technology vice and well and to its maximum what do they need from us they need to understand what's the team vision and this is by the way something I'll be repeating or I have already said before the team vision is a very important thing we need to know where we are going we need to know where we are heading because how can we possibly work if you don't know what is going to be the outcome so that's very important thing and because they have to give an expertise in like certain subject they also need to understand but what are the technical parameters of the features we are asking them to improve right so that's like one level lower than the vision our job practitioner that's me right okay so I don't work only with one team I work with three teams and each of them really need some tender loving care and what do I do in my free time well free time and I'm out of the meetings I am trying to organize these meetings and that's not easy if you have three teams and all at only three hours of overlap right every day so when I organize a meeting I also have to make sure that we know what we are going to talk about so we discuss agenda I have got about 30 different people I see in a meeting so it's quite not an easy thing to do but also I am located in Brno and there are not too many agile practitioners here in Brno so I also make sure that I have time to talk to you guys about agility and like help to solve your questions or at least like be supportive in your teams right so what is my role in a team I'm hoping to make the team happy and motivated and work in an effective way I also try to get some organization into the chaos so I'm there to set up some processes with help of the team and make an agreement that we'll work that way what do I need well it's very simple I need commitment that we will all work the way we agreed and then we talk and we communicate and if something does not work that people are not afraid to speak up engineer I'm sorry not all our engineers are looking like that we actually have engineers with more hair normally right so this is the engine of our work this team of six engineers is there to move things forward and they spend hours each day to discussing solutions and to write code and write tests so really they are the they focus on the development of the tool we committed to deliver how do they contribute well really they are the engine so they work they deliver the result of our team and because we are quite proof of concept research team so they also need to go and talk to different people to find solutions to the problems okay so what do they need it's again the vision they need to understand where we are heading they need to understand why we are there and what we are doing and like you know we are just people and we are individuals and each individual would like to also know what he or she is expected to deliver which and this is very important for engineers as well they need to know what is asked on them right as individuals and of course they need support and they need support from everybody around two more program manager yet another lady on the team a program manager so that's a person she's not with us on daily basis we only see her every now and then why because she is the one who is overlooking the entire program so she has about five projects she needs to look at and take care of so it's only some of us who interact with her on a regular basis yeah what does she do in her day also a lot of meetings really a lot and she's the one who is trying to discuss with different departments or with different teams what is the vision of a program where we are heading what is going to be inside of that release and then this is going to go out so that's her job she she on a basis she's looking at times a timeline and setting a milestones and stuff like that how does she contribute well that's the body which means makes us to move forward with respect of delivering certain features out to the customer so she's there to track she's tracking the team that we are doing well with what we have agreed will deliver so that we are delivering and she also because we have to collect requirements from different places so she's the one who also helps us and supports us with collection of these requirements what does she need from us well she needs to know if we have problem and she can help us to resolve it with respect of resources or with respect of like risks and stuff like that so if suddenly we have got a big blocker we cannot overcome because we are dependent on another team who is not delivering according to their plan she's the one who helps us to talk to the guys who lead these teams and make sure that we agree on some type of compromises priorities and architect that's also a bit off because our architect doesn't have a mustache and instead of pencil he kind of tend to have a cat walking around his keyboard and stuff so that's also not really great but anyway so we work with an architect but what does he do all day well he is constantly in talks discussing some improvements to the overall architecture to changes he's the one who is documenting a lot of stuff distributing across different teams how does he work with us right so I told you we are working on like a proof-of-concept research type of project so we need him a lot because we need to discuss with him some potential changes to the architecture and he's the devil's advocate here like every time he comes with this great idea how this could work he comes and says this scenario that's not gonna work so he's there really to help us see our project from different various different right but he's also a very smart guy so he'll help us to find out some solution and he's helping us to resolve some problems okay so what does he need in order to give us all this wisdom right so he needs to understand again where we are heading with this project and it's been I think four times here so this is a very important one when you work in the team environment we need to know what the goal and he needs to also because he's a technical guy understand the parameters and how things can go okay that was the team right so as you can see there were a lot of very different personas here and these personas need to work together really on daily basis but they have sometimes different needs and they have different responsibilities and roles and I think we need pretty well in like accommodating together and working together as one we all understand I hope what our role is in this team what what are we supposed to do to make the team work fine and where are you heading and not only is the product goal but like also what is our goal as a team like you know self-organization and stuff like that I know this is like I said I'm not gonna really have a job talk but guys our scramble rocks seriously it's great because anytime now any moment you change can go to Trello and you see what we are working on you'll see it because we are updating our cards so it's great everybody can just you know see the reports we have got a lot of meetings as is usual but you know what we change our meetings we adopt them to our needs so for instance we realize that we don't have enough technical discussions and we edit them and it actually put the other meetings a bit more in ease and made them a bit more relaxed because people understand that they can discuss technical stuff but just like not on scrum meetings very good one demo we demo every sprint and every team member makes a demo we record these demo in advance now two minute slots and you can all look look at them and watch them on YouTube so it's really great it's a good thing and and I'm very happy that team is going is doing this yeah velocity right so like we don't like to size cards and we don't like to learn we tend to overplan a lot but it doesn't matter because our velocity is actually constant what happens is that like we tend to deliver about the same amount of work every spring which is great because it helps us planning so like when we hear from the program manager that we need to tell that tell her what we are going to deliver in half a year time we kind of can because we know how quickly we work right so it's really helpful and what our last the most probably is that people are talking to each other and it's not just like our team lead who does cards but everybody on the team is responsible and it's engaged and wants to help and put up cards so it's great we I think we work the way want and if you don't want it we just change it and that's really I think what makes the team good and how I think a healthy team should look like by the way I didn't draw the caricatures so that was under our so thank you for him okay so that's all from me if you have questions please shoot okay so the question is what are the what are some of the problems we have that are occurring what what are the problems that I observe often okay so usually like at the beginning we had problems understanding what each meeting is about so we tend to like do everything in one meeting right so like when we had grooming we were also planning here also grooming cars and stuff like that so we learned how to do it and that's great because now we are really focusing over we prepare agendas for meeting and we are very strict in this because then we know that if there's something out of the agenda we are discussing we are wrong we have to move it to another meeting or another talk and that was really helpful creating these cabal technical meetings because a lot when we have meetings there starts to be ideas coming out and people say oh let's put this on agenda for cabal and we talked about today this meeting is one of the most difficult one I think okay so the question is how do we deal with scope changes well we are a research team right so we have that a lot and I think that I'm not gonna promote agility here but like I think that the way we work it's helping us because we can discuss the requirements and we can roll them down or we can choose the stream which may be a goal it's a lot of discussions but I think that's why we are there that's the purpose of it we don't change scope in a sprint when there's a change we do it it's like you know we do it afterwards we just clarified it with the subject matter experience so just the bit where I'm confused is you have product managers translating customer requirements then you have an architect that's working with the technical team to design and so what is the subject matter experts do and what's the difference between product management and the architect right so we have got two subject matter experts one is working in containers and the other one is QE right so these are the two topics like we don't have like we have good engineers who do containers but she's the one who talks to different teams and has the like a generic experience and tries to find out from different teams how they wear these containers and how they can improve it but if you want a bit more technical staff then go to our team because I'm not a very special person and the QE is helping us to try let's say how we are going to test modules right so that's why he's there for us more questions so typically if you would like to with your experience now I'll give you a dress like in a normal week how many iterations and how different they are for example for the planning for the technical discussions what actually is the the equilibrium between sorry so how many meetings do we in a sprint wow okay so there are the I'm sorry the guys the data spendings which are actually not every day but every other day so Monday Monday Friday 15 minutes straight no longer we have got a planning which is an hour right grooming which is an hour but planning is only once the sprint you have to do the sprint grooming is every week because we need to meet and talk about cards demo is half an hour at the end of the sprint but sometimes faster retrospective very important you know I was just giving some workshop on that we do about 45 minutes to an hour and then we have got Kabul meetings and they are there's one which has one hour every week and there's also a federal working group IRC meeting which is once a week an hour and that's where the technical stuff is discussed question Monday there's about Kabul right what is Kabul that's the technical meeting that's where the guys form and talk 30 stuff like technical solutions and stuff like that I don't go there because I'm lost after one second I just like I see such a question but is there somebody else okay right so the question is that sometimes teams don't have the luxury of having a person for each role but how was the best mix of roles or okay so like for me I think it's up to you you know guys what makes the team because every team is different so you know sometimes it's great to have a moving role for instance scrum master that's a perfect example if you don't have a scrum master you can either dedicate somebody in a team to do that work or you just say hey but you know what's about let's move it like two sprints is one another two sprints somebody else or you just split the activities so you dissolve the roles and sometimes maybe you have got a person who can take the product owner stuff on you know it's really up to the team and thank you so much time is out