I attended the first meetup of the Agile Academy tonight to hear Jeff Smith (CIO of Suncorp) share his story of the agile journey.

Here are my takeaways:

• students have passion, conviction & coherence of thought but it is not necessarily youth that gives them this it is more an acessible learning environment
• the premise behind agile is simplicity
• the job of a leader is not to motivate people, it is to inspire them, your staff should come to work with a passion
• there was not much in the way of agile training out there, so decided to develop within and then share with the community
• intention is to get others to contribute to the Agile Academy, to make it better and fill the gaps
• have learnt there is value in coaches
• good leadership is scarce

Key success factors according to Jeff:

• use passion and ideas not threats and bureacracy
• tell a narrative of who you are and what want to become
• entrepeneurship is not for the few
• need resistance and humility, have courage to change our mind (never give up the right to be wrong) and proviude an environment for this to happen
• create a good listening organisation, you have to ask!
• change almost never fails when it is too early
• connect and challenge people for the collective wisdom – the one thing youy can’t copy is culture
• aim for success not perfection
• do what you believe in and paint a good picture of it (then people will follow)

From the Q&A sessions:

• needed a simple way to describe agile to the business and the board, painted a picture and a simple message. Need to train the business and seed successes in different places and put a support structure behind it. You also need the courage to stop projects.
• “…better to piss people off in the beginning than try and make them happy in the end”
• listen to the leaders (they are not necessarily at the top)
• you need to balance people, technology and processes
• the challanege for the first year was to change peoples belief processes, now Suncorp need to mature
• Scrum can be used anywhere in the organisation (it was used to roll out eLearning by the HR area)
• a project over 6-7 months means that you visibility of what you are trying to achieve
• the less people on a project the better it works
• have to accept what you have and not use that as an excuse for not inventing
• decided the best approach was to aggregate people by business people skill, by technical skill and then by city (as opposed to one centralised testing centre for example)
• the entire team needs to be part of a connected ecosystem