program selection system

Agile practices emerge in a collaborative environment. As the leader on several projects, I saw the emergence of iterative development, test first, evolving functional specs, pair programming, minimal documentation, and customer involvement at every step of the way. Successful tools to create this environment cover creating an open environment, bringing the right experience, skills, and thinkers together, how to stimulate and foster the free flow of ideas, and letting people to decide what they want to do and by when (self-accountability). Tools to lead collaboration will also be introduced.

As I look at these projects, the tools I developed fall into two processes:
1. Collaboration Process
2. Process for Leading Collaboration.

The collaboration process steps are:
- Create an open environment
- Bring the right experience, skills, and thinkers together
- Stimulate and foster the free flow of ideas using sticky notes and group prioritization, and
- Allow people to decide what they want to do and by when (self-accountability).

To collaborate we need the free flow of ideas. This requires a trusting environment - one that is free from fear of speaking up and questioning other ideas no matter who they come from, one that is nonjudgmental.

But how do you create such an environment? How do you maintain it? In this tutorial attendees will learn how to create such an environment, identify gaps to openness, practice tools to remove fear and know what techniques to avoid (those that stifle creativity and innovation).

Next we will address getting the right people in the room – how to avoid myopic thinking and get a wide and diverse set of thinkers with experience not only to solve the problem but help people address the issue with a different view.

To implement collaboratively, we talk about how team members set their own accountability, how teams define their measurements and success factors, and hold each other accountable.

Finally, the conversation of most importance: how leaders step back and when they step up and lead. We will look from both sides of this relationship: what teams want and need; what leaders want and how they can tell when they need to lead. While many leaders know this is important, we often don’t address how it is done. Each person in their own context must discover their own ‘Leadership Tipping Point’ where they understand when and why they step up and how to step back.

The process for leading collaboration is:
- Get the right type of people, those with integrity who are trustworthy and who are a fit for the organization in passion and what they do best,
- Trust your teams first,
- Let the teams decide and let you know the direction they think best for the company,
- Stand back and let people work.

How do we find hire, and promote the ‘right people’? Dee Hock, CEO Emeritus of VISA International, states we should hire on integrity first, then motivation, capacity, understanding, knowledge, and lastly, experience. We usually do this backwards (experience first). In this tutorial we will discuss how to hire and promote on Hock’s criteria.

Yes, leaders must trust first. And we must create a culture of trust where team members are supported in building trusting relationships, where there is a ‘safety net’ so teams can fail early and minimize the impact to team success.

To improve operations, leaders must listen to the solutions of the people closest to the ineffective processes. In this tutorial, you, attendees will learn how to collaborate in identifying processes that are not working and find solutions to improving them.

Many teams fail because leaders have difficulty in stepping back – and do not know when to step up and lead. We will review the strategies we have talked about earlier in this tutorial in the context of leading collaboration across the many different departments in an organization.

In this tutorial, you learn how they can put these tools to work in their organizations at all levels. Working together in hands-on breakout sessions, you discover where your environment might not be open, how to reduce/remove any fear that might be in your organization and how to create a culture of trust. Through the practice of collaboration, you discover effective ways to find creative ideas and solutions to business, operations, and project issues. Finally, we will address the difficult step of standing back and develop some strategies for doing this.

What fascinates me is that by following these steps as a leader, agile arrives! People begin to do customer involvement, iterative delivery, test first, and other agile practices. While agile might work in other situations than these, this method does work. It gives leaders all they through the organization, from CxO to team leaders, tools to support the success of agile.