QUESTIONS FROM WEBINAR - 10TH MARCH 2015 [EARY]

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1 Agile Working John Eary 1. As a 'reluctant absentee' feel obliged to point out there is no current replacement for face to face meetings. It is very difficult to build teams over the telephone. Although technology may take care of this in the future, physical face-to face meetings are indeed critical in establishing relationships. However in my experience once team members have met a few times and have an understanding of each others strengths and contributions and are comfortable then telephone conversations can be useful to re-enforce relationships and used in an informal way to cement relationships. This is particularly true when team members are based in different locations where face-to face meetings need to be more formalised and planned. 2. What about work life/balance? Covered in presentation and my answer given within the webinar. Recording 3. Interesting point about High Speed rail. At the moment passenger numbers are growing fast despite poor infrastructure and Internet shopping. There may be continuing social demand for train travel, I was referring to the future needs of business. 4. Agile working: How should organisations manage their responsibilities to employees resulting from the 'blurring' of lines between work and play? If you manage by outputs and outcomes you are less concerned about when employees are working and playing as long as they are meeting their goals. However there are also issues to do with professional conduct that will relate to job roles. Clearly there are many occupations e.g. in medicine, uniformed services when there is not room for play at certain times. The way forward on this is to convene facilitated workshops on new ways of working to work through these issues. 5. I've heard that greater job autonomy leads to reduced work-related stress. Is this true? Are you aware of any studies that attempt to objectively quantify this? This is a widely held belief as with agile working people have more freedom to address conflicts between work and domestic priorities. An indirect measure is the reduction of longer-term sickness absence of employees from organisations that pg. 1

2 have introduced more flexible ways of working. Unfortunately I do not have specific references for this. 6. I would say that agile working is a mixture of all working styles, remote manager to isolationist as business dictates. What is the presenter's opinion? The essence of agile working is personal choice and I would agree different ways of working are appropriate for different work activities that you undertake. However I was seeking to demonstrate that your choices could have an impact on your colleagues. An agile worker is not a lone worker and still needs to consider themselves as member of a team. 7. Too many businesses pretend to be agile but still seek to control staff. How can they be convinced to adopt true agile working? Yes this is a risk. This is one reason why it is important to have a clear definition of agile working. It is also important that the whole organisation adopts a shared interpretation of the new way of working. Otherwise the commitments made by senior managers may be undermined by a misinterpretation by lower level managers of the Theory X type to which I referred. 8. How do you manage agile working when you want to ensure a consistent approach across a large number of staff members - the sort of thing that is normally managed by tight standards and procedures (i.e. traditional working)? Of course there can be business requirements that means everyone needs to follow strict procedures e.g. in a call centre operation. In introducing agile working these requirements need to be recognised and met. However there may be opportunities to think outside the box. In the call centre scenario a number of organisations e.g. the AA and BT, have introduced the option of home working for these job roles. 9. What is EDRMS? Electronic Document and Records Management System. 10. This is very office based - what about factories, workshops? Office-based work activities currently offer the most scope for agile working. As there are developments in robotics and artificial intelligence it is likely that the job roles in manufacturing and will have more scope for flexibility and lend themselves to more agile working. For example it has been predicted that future jobs in manufacturing will be about servicing the robots that take on the routine work activities and this work can be undertaken remotely (health and safety) 11. How do you reconcile scrum methods, face-to-face in a room doing regular standup meetings to remote working? pg. 2

3 Developments in conferencing technology, e.g. the use of holograms is not so far off, could mean that the dynamic face-to-face experience could be replicated without the inconvenience of everyone involved having to convene in the same physical location. 12. What about the 'around the water cooler' discussions? I am not so sure there are as many water cooler discussions these days doesn t everyone bring their own bottle of water? More seriously the happenstance of people having unplanned meetings that result in discovering information and spontaneous thoughts is important but can happen in other ways. In their personal lives people these days use social media to keep in touch as much as physical meetings. Social media has the same potential for business. LinkedIn, Yammer, Twitter etc. all provide opportunities to have an informal exchange with a wider range of people than those that happen to work in the same building. 13. Can you explain how trust plays a part in agile working and how one should deal with situations where you feel that your trust is being breached? Agile working is the opposite of micro-management where every activity is controlled and checked. It is about passing responsibilities to the employees. In agile working trust is about having the confidence that someone will deliver the goals they have been set and act responsibly and professionally. If there is doubt about trusting employees, say in the early stage in the adoption of agile working, then frequent communication can be helpful as it provides the opportunity to seek and provide reassurance that the goals are being pursued and the required outputs will be delivered on time and to the quality standards set. Clearly if employees are not acting responsibly and professionally they will be subject to the disciplinary procedures of the organisation. 14. If so many benefits why do more orgs not introduce it. After 10 years my organisation is now moving away from it. Of everything that you have said / presented / encountered, what is the no 1 thing for agile to work? Forgive but I think there are three things. 1. Making a strong business case. Ten years ago organisation hadn t recognised the business benefits of agile working. It is only now that momentum is beginning to build. There are number of large organisations that have embraced it in a big way e.g. Unilever, Ministry of Justice. 2. Changing the culture throughout the organisation. Everyone needs to understand what agile working is and why the organisation is adopting it. pg. 3

4 3. Ensuring that everything is aligned with the new way of working i.e. IT, HR policies, adaptation of accommodation so that the ambitions are realised e.g. if IT is not reliable at remote locations then it will provide an excuse to stop the initiative. 15. How do you make agile work where a customer has a very rigid contract focused culture e.g. government. If your customer lays down how you should deliver your service this is clearly limiting and you can only work with any flexibility that is available. However if you can identify savings and service improvements from a different way of working then you can make a business case to the customer when the contract is next up for renewal. 16. Regarding working from home, you say people take time off work when a child is ill. However most people take time off to take care of child and if child is really bad then you cannot work from home anyway as you are too busy with child. Not sure how Agile improves child health so you can work from home when child is ill? This is a matter of degree. If a child is very unwell then they will need your full attention. If the illness is more minor, or perhaps they are sleeping a lot then you can be at home to keep an eye on them and offer comfort, but still get some work done even if it is just checking s. You may be able to do half a day s work at home rather than booking the whole day off. 17. The questionnaire showed that 70% of us is still working in organisations with Flexible working patterns. I am not sure if the 2025 vision you presented is realistic given it is only in 10 year s time and most of us are very behind Agile. Just a thought. None of us have a crystal ball but some of the technological developments will happen well before The world of work of ten years ago was quite different e.g. no ipads or iphones. I believe the technology will be available. It is down to organisations to exploit it. However global competition in the private sector and the continuing need to reduce costs in the public sector will be strong incentives. 18. Do you have any concerns that this evolution in working practices takes the social interaction and therefore the human element out of it all? Commuting on crowded trains is not a very pleasant social interaction of traditional working. As human beings we shall continue to want social interaction. The explosion in the take up of social media shows that we humans adapt to new communication pg. 4

5 technologies and exploit them. Agile working is not about automation it is about living our lives in different ways. 19. How is assurance managed in agile working? Sorry this is too vague a question to answer 20. How would an organisation such as MoD, GCHQ, MI5 or MI6 introduce Agile working? Security is surely an issue. Security is an issue for all organisations adopting agile working. The devices, infrastructure and policies employed in agile working need to meet the security and privacy requirements of the organisation. In the world of espionage I would have thought there was a lot of agile working going on already - if you take James Bond as an example What are the key pitfalls of agile working, and how can you best resolve these? Leaving it to others. Some regard agile working as an IT project, others as an HR initiative. It needs to be an organisation-wide initiative with buy-in at all levels of management and the engagement of staff. Also agile working is not a one-off project but needs to be sustained and re-enforced. 22. Interested in the focus about remote working. While some organisations will focus on adapting buildings to create more activitybased working there are more business benefits to be gained by exploiting technology to enable employees to choose their work locations. The survey we have conducted for ENEI (the Employers Network for Equality and Inclusion) showed that technology is of far more interest to employees than their office accommodation. 23. Most things I have heard about Agile has a strong focus on co-location of teams: the opposite of remote working. Can you explain how these approaches fit together? Answered in Q&A in webinar See Recording 24. I would be interested to know if John has any observations on the adoption of agile working in different business sectors. For example I work in an engineering consultants and am struggling to think how this could be adopted on a widespread basis due to the extensive interactions between members of the project team. Agile working is being adopted across a wide range of private and public sector organisations. Many consultancies already practice forms of agile working but may not recognise it as such. The need for interactions between team members should pg. 5

6 not be a limitation in the adoption of agile working. While there may be the need for some physical meetings, conferencing technologies with the facility to share documents and drawings on screen often meet the needs for interactions between project teams. In fact some international consultancies make use of conferencing facilities to involve specialists from different countries. 25. How can you change an organisation when you do not have enough people to deliver let alone effect a change and your staff are off shore and near shore? Clearly the organisation needs to have enough employees to deliver its contracted services. However the adoption of agile working should produce productivity gains so the amount of resource may decrease from a fixed workforce. If staff are located offshore as well as near shore then the roll out of the initiative will be more challenging. In general you should establish the core principles for agile working for the organisation and then implement them appropriately for the countries where staff are located e.g. to respect local employment laws. Offshore staff will probably require additional support in the transition to agile working. 26. The UK has many Victorian buildings so fitting in office space for home/agile working is a challenge! Shed in the garden seems to be the popular option When telecommuting, as it was then called, first arrived some 20+ years ago a number of people erected cabins/sheds in their gardens. With todays wireless broadband and a paperlite approach there are likely to be a number places in the home suitable for work although this may not be the same room everyday. If there is more than one person working at home at any one time this may be more of a challenge. It has been predicted that in future new builds will be larger to provide more space for home-based work activities, which may include 3D printing. 27. What are LoB apps please? Line of Business applications such as finance, HR systems. 28. How can we deliver agile projects / programmes in a heavily regulated environment e.g. nuclear energy? Agile working needs to take account of the business environment and respect and accommodate legal and regulatory requirements. Even in the nuclear industry there will be some job roles that lend themselves to agile working e.g. those in sales and HR. For the rest it is about looking at new ways of working that could produce benefits while still fulfilling the regulatory constraints. pg. 6