Ep. 118: 12 year-end suggestions for 2023

On the last episode of the Definitely, Maybe Agile podcast, Peter & Dave had a great discussion about 12 year-end suggestions for a more agile 2023. Let’s take a look at the four main categories they discussed.

This week's takeaways:
A. Marketplace and change:
   1. Do more with less
   2. AI in our work
   3. Shorter time horizons (in times of uncertainty)

B. Pragmatic stuff to remember
   4. Two out one in (manage WIP)
   5. High uncertainty means continuous learning and validation
   6. Estimates are just guesses

C. Don't forget
   7. The Agile/DevOps mindset
   8. Risks and contingency
  9. Don't forget to measure

D. End of year
   10. Check your progress/direction
   11. Take time to review/learn
   12. Recognize the people that got you (t)here

We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com 

Transcript

Peter: 0:05

Welcome to Definitely, Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello Dave, how are you today?

Dave: 0:15

Very good, peter. How are you doing? It's always good. It's pouring down with rain outside, because I'm on the West Coast in Vancouver. That's what it does here, but it's also like you've got the end of the tunnel, looking ahead a few weeks from now. The holidays are coming up. It's a good break, that moment when you just want to take a deep breath and slow down and try and clear the desk up before the New Year starts. How about you?

Peter: 0:36

What's it like with you? Oh, very much the same. I've got a busy few weeks and then looking forward to a little bit of time with the family and a bit of relaxation. I think I'm very much looking forward to it because it's been a busy year.

Dave: 0:48

And only cards today?

Peter: 0:50

Yes, well, we have. Last year, and we quite enjoyed doing this, we put together 12 year-end suggestions, so we figured that we'd have 12 year-end suggestions for 2023 this time as well. Just like last year, we've categorized them into four different areas. We've got number one is going to be marketplace and change. Number two is going to be some pragmatic stuff to remember. Number three is going to be a few things to not forget. And number four is going to be what to do at the end of the year. So I think we've got a fun little podcast ahead of us here. So let's get started. Let's dive into these 12 things. So up first marketplace and change.

Dave: 1:26

I think it would be remiss of us if we didn't talk a little bit about AI, and I mean AI is that global thing that nobody quite knows what it means and so on. But let's just say, say, chat, gpt, some of those. There are tools out there. We all know, we've all been practicing using them and when I certainly when I look around me, I think that's one of the critical things that has shifted or changed in that marketplace is we know it's going to come after whatever it is that we do in some way, and everyone is looking to figure out what that means.

Peter: 1:56

It's everywhere. It's almost ubiquitous at this point. Everybody has an AI project or program or direction. They're going in Hundreds of companies spun up overnight and some of them actually with valid business models, and some of them with real people in them, not just machine entities right, it's interesting.

Dave: 2:14

Well, and I think there's there's sort of the lazy way of looking at it which is it'll just help us do our job quicker, better, more productively and so on, and whereas you know it might take away from the last sort of 12 months of bumping into this and experimenting with it and playing around with it, is really there's definitely the improvement in our own kind of ability to do stuff like like just helping us do a better job at what we do or quicker. But there's other opportunities that are harder to dig up.

Peter: 2:43

There are, and there's some very interesting places that not even like the large language model type AIs, which what have driven a lot of the current interest, but the the tying those together with other machine learning models to do really interesting things, or to string a number of large language models together. One of the interesting ones I saw was a, so giving each of the models a role and basically forming a company out of large language models and then seeing what it kicks out of the other end. It's very interesting. Or even when you start to take that into the visual world and you can code a mobile app, a very simple one, by just drawing a picture of it and out it spots out, spits the code and measure out it. Definitely there's a lot of change coming and still to come. Yeah, yeah. So what's next?

Dave: 3:31

Well, so one of the what I found really interesting is I mean, I've worked in complexity for many years, worked on a lot of. You know the part of our mantra whenever we're talking to organizations is trying to help them understand that change is changing right, and it's beginning to happen continuously and we're beginning to have to build mental muscles, capabilities, the ways we work in order to address that change, and I feel like the last sort of 12, 18 months has really accelerated, like it's. It's a situation that I don't think anyone can agree or disagree, you know, can disagree with at this point. So what I wanted to mention is the sort of. Second point is the shorter time horizons that we have to work on, and what I mean by that is when you have rapidly changing, volatile, uncertain environments, you want to make short steps, short time horizons, then reevaluate, then short time horizons and reevaluate.

Peter: 4:25

And I think before it's been a suggestion, whereas now I kind of get the impression if you're not doing it, you must really be finding some scary things happening around you yeah, otherwise, as the overcommit, you're going to find you're spending a lot of money and not in the right direction, that you have to have the ability to change directions quickly, and which means you need that very short time horizon to say, ok, what's the nearest possible opportunity we can make another decision at almost it and change direction.

Dave: 4:53

So you've got these points that you can really kind of pivot and move around. And it's interesting I've sort of seen that change in conversation where it used to get a lot of pushback to say, well, you don't understand, it's a two year program, it's going to take us years to be. Nobody says that really. They're there. They almost can hear it coming out and recognize that it's not really, it doesn't carry the weight it used to. Yeah, definitely. What else do you?

Peter: 5:14

think so. Number three we have on here is the do more with less. I mean and this is definitely something that we're seeing across the board with the economy and with other aspects, where we're being asked to deliver, and then we always have been, and continually, but it does seem to be something of a focus in the marketplace at the moment is that we have to get more done and you're not going to get more to do it. So let's get that more done with what you have.

Dave: 5:38

Well, it's interesting because I think I mean, in order to get that more done, I think part of it is, you know, being able to push back and say, no, you're not going to get all of that, and part of it is shorter time horizons, if we talked to maybe productivity gains through whatever we play with on the AI, chat, gpt front, but a lot of it is just being much more disciplined and aware of how we get work done so that we can keep you know. We have to recognize that there's less and less room for missteps and ambiguity in what we're trying to get done. Operation.

Peter: 6:07

So, moving on to section two, so that was those the three we had for section one. So AI do more with less shorter time horizons, I think. And then we've got section two, which is pragmatic stuff to remember.

Dave: 6:21

So that's the one that kick us off, then what pragmatic stuff do you want us to remember this year?

Peter: 6:25

Well. So this one's come up a few times in some recent conversations with me, which is that the estimates are just guesses, and so the one of the things that we see a lot at the end of year is like tell me how long everything we're going to do in the next year. This kind of goes with that shorter time horizons and do more with less. It's the that there's these, this idea that we're going to be able to predict the future and that we're going to be able to estimate exactly how long the next thing we take on is going to take. And it's not, it's just a guess, and we have to acknowledge that it's guess and that we and that we're not going to be able to necessarily rely on that guess being correct. Because unless we've done something an awful lot of times that we've, we've know exactly what it's going to take to do that, then we really don't know until we get started when we're going to be finished.

Dave: 7:12

Well, it's so. Much of it is to do with movement, right? I mean what we talked about when we talked about the marketplace and changes. Things are moving around us and this has a lot to do with that. It's all well and good, we can spend time trying to be accurate, but the reality is things are moving. Your estimate is a guess of where you think it's moving to. We could think of or what you think the current state is, and we should be chasing it to figure out whether that, you know, was the estimate close, yes, so what's item number two?

Dave: 7:38

Well, this touches on that whole do more with less one. And you and I kind of had that experience with the ebook that we were kind of tweaking on, working on and things like this. But one of the keys that came out of that was there to the idea of two out, one in. So when managing work in progress, you're already busy, so the likelihood of being able to stop and kind of clean things up isn't going to happen. So the idea of just making sure that before you add anything, you you've finished two things, not one, so that you're at least thinning out that work in progress as you move forward.

Peter: 8:09

Yeah, I like this was a nice, simple rule to help you try and get your work in control. We know work in progress is the enemy of flow, so let's really focusing on this as a nice rule to say, hey, this is, this is how we can get things back in control Absolutely, and I kind of like this as a really pragmatic thing that people can do irrespective of this space there and so by.

Dave: 8:31

You know. Just you know whether it's at home, clearing the garage out, or whether it's a work dealing with whatever's in front of you.

Peter: 8:36

It's a really applicable idea, and the third one in this section is your plan should change, so this, this kind of lines up with some of the other things we've been talking about here, so why don't you give us some insight into this one day?

Dave: 8:51

Yeah, well, this is an interest that we get tied to, the idea that a plan is some sort of a certain way of moving forward. And again, the theme of rapid change, dynamic, volatile environments means that actually your plan should be changing. It should be changing not because you wake up and everything around you has changed, but it should be changing because you are continuously validating and learning and modifying your idea of where you're going. So it's more about small kind of turns and directive changes to guide yourself to your end goal, rather than it is being buffeted by change that you weren't expecting. You're validating and learning as you go.

Peter: 9:32

I think the learning piece is important. I mean, if your plan isn't changing, that probably means you haven't learned anything from the last actions you took, or you just validated all of your existing assumptions, which is something else to watch for, because in that case you and you could be right. I mean, there's always that too. But with so much change going on and so much complexity, it's always good to take a look and say are we actually looking at the limits of where we could be?

Dave: 9:58

Absolutely. So that was pragmatic stuff to remember. Estimates are just guesses two out one in managing work in progress, and a little bit about understand your plan should change Not it won't change or change and should be a surprise, but it should change as part of a sign that we're kind of learning and growing and going in the right direction. Now, section three was the don't forget things. So what's the first thing that you think of when you think about don't forget?

Peter: 10:25

So I'm going to start with the don't forget to measure one here, because this is something that I've seen a number of times, both recently in engagement with clients and with the conversations with others, where a plan is laid out and the strategy is put into place and sometimes it's called a strategy and it isn't and one of the clear things that comes out of that is how are you planning on measuring whether you get that thing that you've said is the direction, like if the strategy, direction and motion. If we've got no measure to be able to tell whether we're actually achieving this, then we've got no validation. We don't know whether we're going in the right direction. We won't know whether we should be changing direction. You're not going to know if your plan should change if you've not got any measurements or any data to help you make those decisions.

Dave: 11:12

I'm kind of really excited about this one, because I've certainly, over the years, had conversations about measuring things where sometimes you felt like people just wanted a KPI or a dashboard, some key performance indicator, tell them what it was, and they would chase it. And, of course, what I find interesting now is we have much more in depth conversations about how to define what we measure, whether it's through objectives and key results okay, ours or whether it's through some of the signals versus behaviors that we're measuring, versus goals that we're trying to measure. But there's a lot more thought going into how those measures are described, which I think is a great sign I mean, it's exactly why we put it here is don't forget to measure it but also the fact that it's a topic that people are giving consideration to, which has not always been the case.

Peter: 11:57

So what's?

Dave: 11:58

next I think this is a great reminder which is the agile or DevOps mindset, depending how we look at this. So when I think anybody who's been going through this year, there's been a lot of pressures, different turmoil going on, and sometimes I've had really interesting conversations with people where there's this whole talk of hybrid or you know well, agile, but not in this space, and things like this, and I think sometimes we want to kind of pull back to the core, which is there's a mindset around agility and that mindset has a lot of that. That's why we're all in the space that we're in. Let's remind ourselves of that mindset and rethink about it and just bring it to the fore again. That's really, I think, what one of the points that I wanted to highlight here.

Peter: 12:45

Yeah, because it's valuable to all of the things. We've been talking about it till now. It's understanding how to think about what is changing and how to react to that is absolutely critical, and the same goes for the DevOps mindset and thinking about how do I continually deliver value to my customers, how do I remove it, how do I make that happen, how do I look for where the constraints are, what's holding me back, and look at how we might go about resolving those and that type of thing.

Dave: 13:12

And I find it interesting because I feel like the market we're in, the landscape we're in right now, is more suited, not less suited, to this mindset. And yet, when people get put under pressure, they tend to retreat away from exactly what is going to help them understand and navigate their way through something. So, there's that piece there. It's almost like the moment before dawn where it's darkest, but we can see it kind of shaping up that there are skills and thoughts and approaches there that we can lean on in this at this point.

Peter: 13:43

And I think some of that comes down to being comfortable with uncertainty and the so yes, definitely.

Dave: 13:51

That brings us to the third point. What did you want to bring us on this one?

Peter: 13:54

Well, risks and contingency, which ties in to the comfort with uncertainty here.

Dave: 13:59

Now I dare you to try and talk to the head of information security and talk to them about comfort with uncertainty, because it isn't that straightforward, right? That's the thing. The real life is different. No, real life is different, right?

Peter: 14:11

Yeah, I mean there is, but we have an understanding of, like, how we assess risk and what we see as risks and we.

Peter: 14:20

So there's a we have to be aware of how much risk are we willing to take and where are we willing to draw the line.

Peter: 14:26

And we also have to understand that what we see as risky may not be what the person we're talking to sees as risky either, which is why you end up in a lot of that friction, especially between, like, security and other parts of delivery areas and the understanding of then, what is an appropriate level of contingency I can put in. I mean, how much risk am I willing to take? And that can be that can come in many, many different forms. So it's really understanding and looking at the system holistically, understanding where are those risks, what contingency, what mitigations are in place, how can I appropriately manage those? How am I creating the right conversations around risk? Because the worst thing you can do in the world is just sweep it under the rug and try to say, well, there was any risk here, we don't need to look at this, not important, and whereas in fact it's really important to understand, think about those risks, make them a first class citizen in the part of your conversation.

Dave: 15:15

Whenever I want to reference the conversation or the comments I made about measuring don't forget to measure, and the fact that more and more, we're talking about measuring in sort of more valuable ways, and I think that's the same thing that we're seeing about risk and contingency. Is it used to be? You know, two sides of two very different views, and I think we're now having a lot more great conversations about exactly what you're saying how to bring risk into the conversation, how to bring contingency to it and I just referenced one of the clients I've worked with recently. There's some amazing conversations around attaching probabilities to estimate and just beginning to recognize that in order to have those conversations about risks, contingencies, we need to continually learn how to calibrate our measurement of uncertainty, and that came into it Just a really interesting conversation is very relevant to this. So that's on the don't forget the three things. Don't forget risks and contingencies, the agile DevOps mindset that kind of brought us all here in the first place, and then the don't forget to measure.

Peter: 16:14

And that leaves us with section four. So the end of the year, things to do at the end of the year, and I think I'll start this off with recognizing the people that got you here or there, like the. So we've had a busy year and then, hopefully, people have had a year to remember in good ways and there's been good things that have happened this year. And think about the people who've helped you and the people who have either been there to support you or directly helped you in one way or another, and spare a moment to say thank you.

Dave: 16:44

I really like this and I think so much of the time we don't kind of raise our glasses, if you like, to the people around us and just to recognize how they are the reason we are wherever we are Indeed. And what's the next one? Well, I don't think you can ever talk about the end of one year and going into the next year, or any of end of one phase going into the next, without having a conversation about retrospectives. It is, while we started this conversation by talking about how we've got an eye on the next couple of weeks and looking forward to being able to take a break and spend a bit of time with friends and family and all the rest of it that many of us will be doing over the next few weeks, and I think it is also to be remembered it's a brilliant time just for putting some thought to what worked well, what you'd like to see different in the following year, and so on, and learn from that as we go forward so that retrospective piece really stands out.

Peter: 17:33

Yeah, indeed, and it's the even better if taking time to review, learn and if you've got some time of picking up a book it doesn't have to be business book, just pick up something, read something, learn something, pick a bit of relaxation we all need one less OK, so check your progress and direction. So I mean and this is a another key one is that lots of stuff will have happened. We all have larger life goals, things we're trying to achieve, places we're trying to go and take a look at what comes out of your retrospective, look at what's going on. Are these things driving you in the direction you want to go? I think it's the think big starts more. Yeah, we've got those big targets. Are we taking small steps towards a big task?

Dave: 18:20

I love the way you've kind of wrote this into a personal view as well, because when I wrote this one down, when I was thinking about it, I was thinking it's the end of a calendar year, often close to the end of a financial year. There's a lot of how far have we come, where are we going? And the focus here is focused on the direction, the growth that's happening, more than the absolute number that may or may not have been achieved right. Lots of uncertainty out there, so sometimes it's not always the number that you wanted, but are you going in the right direction, learning and changing?

Dave: 18:47

I love what you've added there about your own personal growth, and I think it's a few years now since the pandemic, which was the big rethink what we think about what's going on from our own view, and I think a lot of us took a lot out of it. So again that reminder to look around. Are we moving in the right direction? Are we getting where we want to be? I love that way of just wrapping things up. I think there's a great place to end.

Peter: 19:10

Yeah, and so with that, that's 12 things and, of course, four categories. So I think it's a great set of things for people to remember, and we'll include the list in the episode description, and I look forward to next time, absolutely so, until we speak again shortly.

Peter: 19:28

And I think we're going to take a little bit of a break over the holiday season so we can all rest and recuperate and come back energized with lots of more interesting topics! You've been listening to Definitely, Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts, Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital agile and DevOps at scale.