I saw Max Ekesi speak on what he feels makes for good Agile as a part of the Agile Austin Featured Speaker Series on the tenth of March.

Maximilian Ekesi is pictured here with Kassandra K. Cardenas, the current chief product officer for Agile Austin of which the Agile Austin Featured Speaker Series is an offering. The event was hosted at Kasasa in Austin, Texas and Kasasa does some sort of banking-based tech. Max wants you to cook up an Agile process that is customized to your team, and, to that end, he walked us through what he described as his twenty year history, though it looked like nineteen years to me, and spoke to its pain points. He started at Dell in 2001 (did you know that dell.com was the first shopping cart site to do a million dollars of business in one day?) and then moved on to GM (General Motors) and finally landed at Whole Foods which is now owned by Amazon. He admitted that while he was at Dell and GM that he felt most energized about Agile when he would visit an Agile Austin talk and compare notes with other individuals excited about Agile. The problem as it turned out with both Dell and GM was the businesses themselves and he offered the Peter Drucker (a consultant) quote: "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." At either Dell or GM, I'm not sure which, Max was told to increase productivity by ten percent and he vented about the obsession over metrics which can always be skewed suit-to-purpose. I think he pushed back in that circumstance that he would first have to measure what was to find a baseline. "DRiVE" by Daniel H. Pink was put up on a pedestal as a pretty good book by Max and he argued that autonomy, mastery, and purpose are desired by knowledge workers per that book. Max feels that co-location is important and that a team should not be half split between say America and India. He also feels it is best to interact with the business owners and did not speak kindly of Michael Dell and his posse walling themselves off from development in their own little building in Round Rock where average Joe worker bee isn't allowed to go. At Whole Foods, the dev and the business sit on two adjacent floors of the same building! Max felt that teams should be end-to-end teams and not, for example, a few devs who have to argue for the testing team to allot them a resource for a spell. Instead, a team will just have devs, a tester, a project manager, and support and development DevOps characters rolled up into it. The teams are thought of as two pizza teams in that you may feed the teams with two pizzas and these two pizza teams are given autonomy to conduct their own affairs. One of the ways there is a break with autonomy however is that all teams have to follow a common cadence and there is a somewhat centralized roadmap. I suppose sprints fill a PI (program increment) and eventually it was decided that quarters of the year made for the best PI shapes. There are organizational meetings across all teams to announce intentions for a PI per team. Whole Foods is kind of chilled out, but presenters in the meetings I just mentioned have incentive to deliver as they presented and there are also financial rewards for teams that deliver. A few random things: Jeff Lomax was an attendee for this event and in spotting him I was able to put a last name with the name "Jeff" as suggested here. LeSS, with just the e in lowercase, stands for Large-Scale Scrum and is a framework for scaling Scrum up, big time. Max Ekesi is pictured here showing off a list of little splinters for different canned ways to approach Agile:

"Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World" by David Epstein seems to be the book the Agile Austin book club is chewing through. Max stressed that there is not enough disruption in Austin, not like the wild madness of California tech. Chimp is an internal chat app that Amazon peddles to its own and Amazon also made its own cameras for its check-yourself-out stores.