The Agile Organization – Lucas Dussurget, Valiantys

This is Textron TV. Well today I have the pleasure being joined by Luca desertion. He is with CEO billionthis might I say that right am I close Lucas?

Close enough. Okay very much good enough for horseshoes as they say as we say, so tell us a little bit. Welcome.

Tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us a little bit about what your company does. And so I'm under CEO of valiantes I based in based in London living here for 15 years and my passion is always been around.

How do we get? Stuff to work work better whether it be teams processes tools that it's love to see things work better. And that's what we're doing at paleontes or focus is all around getting teams to work better through technology leveraging technology and the best processes particular agile methodologies and enabling other teams to make the most of to make the most of these Technologies and processes to change how they work.

I know that you're passionate about agile, and I'm sure you've worked with a lot of teams implementing agile, and they practicing it yourself. Tell us a little bit about that experience. We've worked with you know, our journey with agile started a long time ago.

We've been a partner of atlassian for 15 years and atlassen's been the standard. system that stuff code development teams have been managing their workflows for He is and years now and all the some almost all software teams in the world have experimented adopted scaled agile some point on the agile journey in the last 10 15 years and as such we've really been at the Forefront of this of seeing this adoption of agile practices as our customers primarily or initially deaf teams have wanted to adopt these these practices and also evolve the tools that support these practices and so we've that's what we've been doing. Now beyond that themes as we see it is devops change where we're now doing this with it teams doing agile itsm and Beyond we're getting interest from marketing people.

For example who want to who want to attach out as well. We're moving towards this connected Enterprise or Enterprise agility and we hear CEO of talk about wanting to become agile. You wouldn't hear that if you go no, no, it's kind of sort of like lean the lean business agile job business is certainly expanded from what we've done within the technical World software world.

It's interesting because atlassian's products like jira specifically has gone from a ticketing system to workflow right would describe it but much more taking on being competitive with service now and companies like that. I would imagine that's taking you into some of those other parts of the organization. Is that how you kind of gotten into King with other parts of businesses we started with Dev to getting a system.

But if you think about it, if to quote someone else software is eating the world and therefore software teams have big are becoming more and more Central to A bank software is becoming crucial to their product. They go to market their offering immediate company a Telco software is so Central and software teams want to work? In following agile methodologies and therefore the whole organization is having to adapt to that to react to this disruption initially but positive disruption that the software teams are bringing and the subject is that things are coming with their tools.

They're coming with jira. and it's kind of You know a logical step for those teams who see this the system used to support agile ways of working to enable that which has this Universal quality where you can put any workflow in it. It's an easy next step to be putting it over to it operations to marketing to to give you some example we have.

Insurance companies who use jira to manage and the writing processes. So you have hundreds of Underwriters across the world collecting tons of documents sending them to people who will review them. They'll do all that in jira, or we'll see We'll see marketing teams manage all their the campaigns their release calendars their projects in jira.

at the end of the day if it's if it's a process if it's a workflow, it can be digitized and it can benefit from from agile ways of working and it can benefit from tools that allow you to scale this to industrializes like share. Makes a lot of sense, you know an agile you have cross-functional teams right product folks that are part of it others. So you kind of cross-pollinating some of the process and tools and methodology philosophy and how you work but also, you know development isn't just an IT thing.

There's a ton of development going on outside of it and business units and in marketing and playing it's in different organizations. So Some of the low codes some of it, you know, you know c++. Just all varieties of it.

So it seems really easy or natural fit that that Evolution would happen to start to spread beyond the boundaries of software teams. Yeah, absolutely. And and the the other teams love the and really recognize the benefits of agile, so it's not just something that they That they see happening and they have to adapt to it because now developers are working in different ways.

They're releasing much faster. The pace of change is going faster. they're also seeing the benefits of adopting agile the benefits of being able to adapt to constant change so much so much faster.

That's the Amaze the key benefit of agile is that it creates that culture of adaptation that culture of constant change and it makes it normal. It it sort of trains. It's organization to be designed for constant change and for constant repositioning and that's something that's very attractive as well.

When you're an organ part of the organization that perhaps is more much more rigid and structure. It's also something that's attractive because it's about empowering teams empowering teams to make decisions for themselves. So it drives to more to happier team to hire retention.

And that was something that's really attractive for these other parts of the organization. Well, it's in other parts of business are being asked to move more quickly and be more adaptive pivot things like that. Just like software teams are so and with covid, you know with covid it kind of brought that it's accelerated that Trend, you know, when you have everything themes distributed globally teamwork has been forced to evolve even more.

It's been stressed a lot. And so people that looked at How do we how do we maintain that teamwork that productivity while we have hybrid workers and more and more Global teams? Yeah, we did our research team which I'm part of did did some research and that was exactly a question.

We were asking are some of the development or methodologies things like agile. Scrum meetings stand up meetings things like that are those are those starting to be used utilized during covid time by the parts of the organization. It was a very very strong positive that absolutely they naturally gravitated to that.

Do you do you do most of your work still with development teams or you increasingly doing more outside development? Increasingly more outside. I think that and the challenges are different with development teams.

It's more it's no longer about how do we adopt agile at the team level? I think that's become. It has become a standard by and large but more about how do we adopt?

How do we scale this all the way to the c-suite? And they're different approaches to doing that but you know traditionally you would have what we call Project portfolio management, which is very command and control agiles kind of challenge that so at the at the team the team level you have these new ways of working but that the part above had not evolved and so you had this Clash where the c-suite would have visibility up to a level and then it's agile and you know sure we we're struggling to get visibility we're struggling to know costs are so bringing agile to the Enterprise level is the main challenge that we helping companies solve. When it comes to Dev teams.

When it comes to outside of outside of that team, it's more around the maturity is much lower. So it's more around. What is the benefits of agile?

And how do we apply this recipe which has been perfected over many years for Dev teams to a marketing organization or an IT operations organization where the drivers are constrains the expectations so different. Um, but marketing is a great example where a lot of the marketing work actually mirrors so much of software development projects. It's all about how do we bring products to Market?

How do we lead cross functional teams doing a big marketing campaign is very similar to a sizable software project we need Cross functional teams, we need testing we need ideation. We're going to need to release and there's going to be assets artifacts validations so much of this is similar to to death. It's interesting because I think about it in development.

We're used to certainly project management methodologies and you know things like agile and devops and have come along and part of our environment part of our culture a lot of times in in the business units are outside of it. Maybe project management has been part of what the their work environment is if they're like launching a product or something. There's a lot of lot of functions who may have a process or workflow, but nothing like agile that's sort of a methodology that that wraps around it to help all of that happen.

How do you how do you find folks? Warming up to that idea of like okay, I understand. There's a process for meetings.

But what do you mean there's an agile process for how we're gonna do all our work was it you get kind of skepticism and how do you overcome some of those things? Yes, there can be skepticism. I think the key is to get.

The right level of executive engagement to any agile transformation. You you need to get leaders on board leading that change and influencing it and even showing showing the example, but a great example of that would be illegal team. And legal teams are not always known for being the most.

The earliest adopters of new tech and but there's a lot about agile that you can adapt you can you can adapt to to Legal workflows? And we we've implemented jira and agile methods for example to in-house legal teams of large customers where they get all these inbound requests and it is NDA reviewed and it is contract reviewed we have this project here. So there are tasks.

There are projects. This projects are going to have to involve a lot of people and we're gonna need transparency across the board. We're going to visibility across the board.

We may need to adapt really quickly. Suddenly that doesn't sound so far from from agile and you can bring in your your visual boards and you can bring in your your scrum teams with You might not call it scrum. You want to give it another name?

Maybe that doesn't sound as as they keep perhaps to your to your to your legal team, but they they see really enjoy doing their standard meetings reviewing the backlog doing estimates prioritizing that backlog and going through going through rituals to enjoy the tool facilitates as well. All these interactions knowing who does what who's where? And these ones give me another satisfaction because these are usually teams that that have been very poly served in terms of method and Technologies in the past.

No one's really been building modern ways of working for lawyers and and it's great to be able to make a big difference and going from sending a Word document without look to collaborating collaborating in this way. Very good is that it's exciting. It's exciting to share what works whether it's from it or software Dev product projects and others.

I know you've got to study a report that you all put together. Like to hear some more about that and we'll include a link and in the description the show notes. So folks can yeah, we've um our team Square within a really good white paper called Journey to the connected Enterprise and it talks about so it really more focused on on those deaf teams that are looking to scale agile that are looking to really get to the the food connected Enterprise having the c-suite aligned with the teams and vice versa and all the levels in between.

How do we How do we you know, how do we we meant this disconnect that we tend to see so we've done a lot of research on that and and at the project that that's something that's very close to a very close to us today. And there's a report that's out on this called Journey to the connected Enterprise. So it's extremely useful because I think our organizations I guess and I should really small but go through that transformation right where you may do things on a smaller team by team, you know depth project basis, but at some point hitting that scale taking it to the next level and increasing adoption or being successful and adoption there's some yeah, that's where the real challenges I think start because it is organizational change not just change on a local level.

Absolutely, it's you know, agile adoption has been very much a bottom up. Change the teams have taken it upon themselves have proven that they deliver more value with this. But it's not usually something that's been Guided by the by the Sea Suite now we're having the C50 interested.

They want adopt this and they want to bring all the way out. And this model top-down change movement organizational change. It's it's harder and it's harder because of the scale.

And the element of consistency as well that you you'll seek to to obtain when you're at a team unit. Your consistency is sort of within that team. It's a lot easier to obtain when you're 500 teams and you want to 500 teams to to work in unison retaining the freedom agile gives them the ability to adapt but also bringing that sort of overall sense of coordination and visibility.

and yeah in in our experience it I mean if the classic Trio of people processing them tools, you need all three we need to start with people and you start with people at the top getting the executives on board getting them to lead the change to advocate for it. You need to learn the processes Define what you're gonna be they might deviate slightly from the templates that exists in the market. And then you need the tools to sustain this to make it work to to industrialize it and we've seen also Transformations that failed because of lacking the right tools.

Very good. Well Lucas. Thank you very much.

I'll put the link to the report specifically in our description working folks find out more about your company. And the link to the report will will take you to to the word to our website. We have a Blog with with regular posts on topic of agile transformation.

I suggest something that great. Well, thank you. Luke has been great talking with you Lucas disorge with valiances.

We'll talk to you soon. Thanks, Rich, okay.