Tag Archives: retrospectives

A Code Camp Every Week

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You’ve asked.

At least a couple of you did!

Here are the basic principles of the HealthEquity approach to lunch and learns. This article is the super abbreviated version of a 10,000-word epic I’ve been writing for ages.
Me when I realized no one wants to read a 10,000-word epic article.

Why do I care? Why should you?

Folks outside HealthEquity might consider this part of the secret sauce of our organization. Any team/company in the world could take the same approach, and we wish they would. As an industry, everyone benefits from more engaged, better-educated teams.

I don’t remember the first time I saw the following set of questions, but they are deeply ingrained in my approach to leadership. What could be worse than an entire staff of expert beginners?

“What happens if we spend time, effort, and money growing and coaching our team members and they leave the company?”

“Isn’t it worse if we don’t make those investments and our team members stay with the company forever?”

-Someone I Paraphrased

I want to build on this micro-focused concept of individuals working for a single company and expand it to the macro level. Let’s be honest with ourselves, in this world where technology people are in perpetually high demand, folks often switch jobs every few years. Initially, my goal was that folks wouldn’t leave our team, or at least when they do, their new employers would take notice and see a pattern of excellent people coming from HealthEquity. Also, I wanted folks would have fond memories and recommend us as a place for their friends to work. I realize now, this was driven by ego, and it was too narrow a scope for the vision we really need.

We need to be thinking about the success of our industry as a whole. To that end, I propose the following:

Continuous Learning Manifesto
Focus on doing what is right for our team members, companies, and customers, by looking for ways to continuously measure and improve our learning and share our findings with the world at large.

Stepping off the soapbox now…

Preaching is not the point of this article. Let me share the cool stuff we’ve been doing.

Some of my co-workers love lists, so I’ll use a list to illustrate the cycle we’ve been through.

  1. We realized we could improve and asked for feedback.
  2. We used the feedback data to create a plan to improve.
  3. We acted on the plan.
  4. We built feedback into the program.
  5. We continued to listen and act on feedback.

The short version is: we retrospected.

Here’s what we ended up with. A multi-track “lunch learning” program for seven out of every ten weeks 4 times yearly. 56 total days a year!

I’ll say it again. MULTI-TRACK SESSIONS SCHEDULED 2 DAYS A WEEK 28 WEEKS A YEAR.

You’re probably saying, “That’s crazy!” Originally, I might have agreed, but we’ve been doing this for 3 years running. We’ll kick off our 4th year this month (February 2019)!

Here’s the quick version of what we do (yeah, another list):

  1. We pay for lunch.
  2. We facilitate our educators.
  3. We retrospect individual sessions and the program as a whole.

Where we started.

In the beginning, our lunch and learns were just like yours. Sparsely attended, often complained about soapboxes for management and the elite of our organization. We had to figure out how to democratize the process.

Several members of our teams responded to our early efforts to move from “all video, book, and preach” to something new. We were doing one thing a day three days a week, and everyone was expected to attend unless they had more important work. Anyway, the feedback was this: “Why not do something where there are different options for different people who want to learn different things? Multi-track-style!” I was floored. I once helped organize a small tech conference, and it was a ton of work! There was no way to make this happen, or so I thought.

Here’s an anonymized schedule from mid-2016.

Taking things one step at a time, we surveyed for interests and found that people wanted to learn about some specific things. Then we put out the word to everyone working in tech at HealthEquity. We had plenty of volunteers! For a time, I took on scheduling rooms, building a schedule for ten weeks, running retrospectives, helping presenters, and teaching a few things here and there.

From the beginning in 2015, we also opened up Intro to Coding in C# classes to the entire company, and even managed to promote several motivated individuals into our technology group as part of the effort!

If it seems like all of this was an epic amount of effort, you’d be right. But we spread it out over time and learned as we went, so it was never too much to handle at once. Eventually, as we retrospected, we found ways to streamline. As things streamlined, we expanded outside the technology group to the entire company in 2018 including plenty of non-technology topics!

What’s next?

We’re still evolving, and now we’re creating tools to assist with our practices. I’ve intentionally left a lot of detail out because I know not everyone is interested in it. Like I said in the beginning: no one wants to read a 10,000-word epic. I’m warming to the idea of calling this concept “Lean Learning”. What do you think of that?

If you have questions or want to hear more about HealthEquity’s Lean Lunch Learning program, hit me up on LinkedIn ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/williammunn/ ) or in the comment section below. I’m more than happy to help you get a similar program started, or tell you reasons why you should work at the greatest HSA company in the world!

Response Unicorn Isn’t Responsive (When Your Team Doesn’t Get “Agile” or “Lean”)

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In response to Agile: 3 Signs That You May Be Drinking Unicorn Blood by Joseph Nielsen. Joseph is a friend and former co-worker who’s reviewed my stuff in the past, and we collaborated on the concept for this post. I’m just a year late in publishing it.

Whatcha Mean We Wanna Be Agile? What The Hell Is Lean?

Having spent at least half of my career on teams with ad hoc organization and work practices, this is a question I once asked. It was my first time at Agile Roots in early 2010 when I knew I wanted to be Agile. I mean, I understood the value of some of the tools and practices often associated with Agile. Like several people from my company at the time, I had caught the “vision” and thought bringing back some of these tools and practices would make our organization Agile.

I was a development team lead at a previous employer at the time and was utterly unprepared for the level of resistance we would receive from both upper management and individual contributors on my team. Knowing what I know now about change and why people find it scary, I’d recommend my younger self to read the book Fearless Change: Patterns For Introducing New Ideas or a similar work. Nevertheless, I (and several others) pushed forward with our “agile rollout.” We created physical kanban boards on every empty wall in sight and held standups around them. In the meantime, the company was hiring traditional PMO project managers who were trying to put it all into MS Project, and some folks were trying to get traceability by plugging the results of standup into electronic kanban boards using Team Foundation Server.

Rightly, many folks were questioning the approach and overall vision. Developers just wanted to go back to having their 30-45 minutes being spent in standups back. Management wanted PMO-style project traceability, and accuracy be damned. Analysts wanted to build their requirements and throw them over the wall to developers. QA testers and dev wanted to interact as minimally as possible.

They were all quoting Carly Simon whether they knew it or not.

Are you seeing some problems?

We didn’t get buy-in.

We didn’t have a concrete strategy for implementation.

Most importantly: WE WEREN’T HAVING RETROSPECTIVES. For some misguided reason, we made the same mistake I’ve seen so many others make: we thought standups were the key, not retrospectives. To be honest, I’m not even sure we knew where to start.

I’ve heard this called frAgile. At any rate, eventually something had to win out, and it was the waterfall/ad hoc approach. We took down all the boards and ended all of our agile experiments at the direction of leadership. I don’t blame them. The whole situation was a hot mess.

Other Ways To Do It Wrong

I had seen the light, and therefore, the next company I worked for wasn’t adamantly against Agile. I made sure of it. However, that company is no longer in business. No, I don’t think it had much to do with their agile adoption or the semblance of it they had. This group had many of the basics of Scrum in place, even if they got there partly by accident.

They would pick up bits and pieces and bolt them on until, at a certain point, they had standups, planning meetings, reviews with stakeholders, and a leader huddle which sort-of worked like a scrum of scrums. But they were estimating work in hours, they didn’t organize cross-functionally, stuff was “thrown over walls” for others to pick up all the time, and THEY WEREN’T HAVING RETROSPECTIVES.

You might ask, where did the good practices come from? The folks in charge had those ideas. If an idea didn’t come from someone in charge, it probably wasn’t an idea worth having. All fine and dandy, but you can imagine the teams didn’t feel much autonomy (a key motivator from Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us). They certainly weren’t coming up with a lot of great ideas on how to be better.

I came in and still had my Agile Roots-colored glasses on. Everything I wanted to do was related to getting folks thinking about continuous improvement, continuous learning, and reflecting on what we were doing and experimenting to see what we could do better. (By the way, I believe that as an Agile organization, those are the main components you MUST HAVE to get to a thriving place.)

At any rate, my enthusiasm was– out of place, and my leaders reminded me on several occasions that I should mind my position and keep my head down.

So I did.

They promoted me for it. Twice.

With a little more clout, I picked my battles, and where possible, I tried to get the folks I worked with to think differently. We were starting to see some progress. Developers were getting excited about our work again. They were getting back the passion for this amazing job we do. By this time I was the software architect for all the teams, and I was unhappy. Even if folks in the org were starting to catch the vision, upper management was not. I believe they thought we had our working system and didn’t need to try to make it better. Two years was an awfully long time to see as little progress as we had, and I felt like I was still dragging leadership along kicking and screaming.

Additionally, the company was struggling financially (and worse than I knew). When I announced my intent to start looking for another job, the next day I was asked to put in my notice after having been promoted during that same calendar year. They couldn’t afford me if I weren’t in it for the long haul.

So I tucked my tail between my legs and decided to do better at picking my next employer. I wanted a place where Agile was already a reality, or at least where a culture of learning and improving wasn’t just “this silly idea Will has.” Three weeks later I was starting work at what I hoped would be the right place. The lesson, as far as I was concerned at the time, was that bottom-up influence doesn’t work for Lean-Agile adoption.

The Grass Was Greener (Purpler)

HealthEquity touted their culture when I was interviewing, and I DID NOT buy into it at first. My previous employer was ranked in the top 50 for corporate culture in the nation more than once by Forbes. “Culture” was no longer a brand of kool-aid I drank. I guessed the purple drink was probably laced with cyanide or strychnine.

I did know three things about HealthEquity:
1. A friend of mine already worked there, referred me, and spoke highly of the place.
2. The director I’d be reporting to was new to the company, and he seemed to share some of my values and was open to new ideas.
3. The company was offering competitive wages including stock options. I didn’t assign a mental value to the stock options (they had none), but I figured if they were incentivizing folks by giving them a stake in the company, that probably wasn’t all bad.

It was enough. Now I’ve worked for HQY almost double the amount of time I’ve ever worked anywhere else. We’ve been through good times and bad times and great times.

When I started, there was no SDLC at HealthEquity. Stakeholders would sit next to developers and tell them how to program. Developers would push code directly to production and had admin access to the production database. We had a QA manager (in a QA department of one), and he ended up doing DevOps and release management as a full-time job because no one else was doing it, and the company assigned him the “quality issues” they were having with releases because that’s when everything broke.

Work was very ad hoc with a tendency toward waterfall. I don’t remember my actual response when I was finally allowed to contribute effort toward a production project that wasn’t a bug, I know I was ecstatic after the months in purgatory. I’m not sure if I let the “excuse me” out when my director asked me to create a comprehensive design for an entire project that looked like something that would take months to complete before I wrote a single line of code.

Of course, I tell you this to supply a baseline. HealthEquity is now one of the premiere agile shops in Utah. How did we do it? RETROSPECTIVES. Partly.

It Matters Who Buys In

The company hired a new CIO/CTO about three months after I started. Her role was to bring us to some semblance of order, so we could scale predictable teams and get the quality problem under control. I think it was her second month when we had some ridiculous number approaching TWENTY urgent production releases because each successive release to production either didn’t fix the problem we were trying to fix or they caused a cascading issue so drastic it required another urgent release.

The CIO/CTO was patient and prescribed a strict diet of agile conversion and a focus on quality. The quality staff ratio improved to one tester for every two developers in short order. A director of PMO with a strong Agile SLDC background was brought in. Our tooling and work pipelines were updated and organized. We organized into cross-functional teams of dev and qa. Then came the consultants.

To their credit, the consultants did a great job setting a baseline for what Agile should be while training us on the specific process of Scrum. The sessions were filled with retrospectives and lean coffee. I was in heaven. Yes, there were a few folks who were not pleased. Mainly those who’d been with the company for some time. They didn’t take long to self-select out to new jobs once the future of HealthEquity technology became clear. The baseline was set, and that was one of the keys.

The consultants, I think, were a critical factor. It showed everyone two things:
1. Leadership was serious about this agile thing because they were taking us away from the constant pressure to deliver more features so we could learn about it.
2. As a company and a team, we were willing to put our money where our mouth was. Hiring consultants is in no way cheap.

Is this the end? Have we achieved “AGILENESS LEVEL 5000”? No. Will we ever? Probably not. The secret true agilistas know: there is no such thing. There is only review and improve. At HQY our technology leadership (and even our CEO) understands this. We give our teams room to experiment, fail, improve, succeed wildly, and be better tomorrow than we are today.

The goal of this phase of adoption was to set the baseline with a consultancy group, create ground rules, then unleash the continuous improvement and learning. The consultants were brought back on site multiple times to iterate. Over time, folks began to catch the vision. We hired in-house agile coaches to take over the continuous improvement. These are people who could be consultants in their own right, but wanted a 9-5 at a local company. The dedication to doing nothing halfway drove home the idea that HealthEquity is in the lean-agile thing for the long term.

Why Is It Awesome?

At HealthEquity, teams work together with leadership to take action on feedback and retrospectives. At first, I remember being surprised when issues were actually addressed. I’ve never worked somewhere so responsive. In previous organizations, near revolt was sometimes required to make any meaningful change. Here, we adapt, adjust, test our assumptions, and try something new when we don’t get the result we hoped for. Again: retrospectives. But the source of our willingness to experiment and take action to improve comes from the top down. If your organization’s leadership doesn’t believe in it, and you do– maybe it’s time to start looking at better options.

Like Joseph wisely quoted when he read this “love is a battlefield”. Struggling and improving together is the point; it is the destination. Today, we are working toward a low WIP-limit team collaboration approach and building out the quality and tooling to support Continuous Delivery. Will that be the end? No. Our teams will not settle. They will continue to find ways to improve. It’s in our DNA.

Let’s Retro This Article, Shall We?

What went well:

  • My reviewers were fantastic, and the article wouldn’t be half as well written or have as many good images/memes without them (THANK YOU, Joe, Katie, Britton, Caulin, Matt.)
  • It’s always a little dicey supplying personal details in an article like this, but I think it adds some credibility and people seem to like it.
  • Writing about this helped me increase my understanding of the patterns of a successful agile rollout.

What didn’t go well:

  • The speed with which I completed the article. MONTHS.
  • I let it block other things I’ve intended to write.

What could improve:

  • It could have maybe been broken up into a couple of articles– I waffled over this a lot. So looooong.

I’d love to see your retrospective items in the comments, fair reader.  Also, why not check out my other Agile articles. See you next time.