Klaus Nielsen's Agility Narrative on Agile portfolio management gap

Klaus Nielson talks about his personal journey as a product manager, his passion for writing based on his need to understand. How scaling of Agile, and hybrid models of portfolio management is challenging. He talks about how he uses knowledge to solve these challenges. He sees agile portfolio management and the value management office as the next frontier. Be believes that the commercial methodologies will solve the missing element in the next 5 plus years.

As hosts, we engaged in a more spirited way in hosting Klaus's and the telling of his agility narrative. This may be a pattern that will evolve for future podcasts.

Enjoy - Klaus has great knowledge of this topic whether working at team, portfolio or organization level. I wonder whether it is the commercial engines of these methodologies that will solve the scaling challenge or will it be the customers?

Check out Klaus's book at Amazon or LinkedIn profile or company website.
Want to learn more about the co-hosts - Martin's LinkedIn Profile and Janet's LinkedIn profile

0:00 Welcome
0:48 Early part of Klaus journey
3:11 Klaus's experience with predictive product management
4:18 Introduction to Agile methods as part of predictive projects
5:16 Approach to Agile - Mindset, Lean, Foundational writing, tools, artifacts... trace it back to Agile Manifesto, Lean...
7:08 Initially it was Agile at team level, now it is about many teams, portfolios & transformation
8:03 Is it the structure or the mindset? Challenging of mindset change
9:22 Best practice, adoption of methods including portfolio management and going full hearted
11:02 What in SAFe is not having Agile portfolio management
11:56 Who is the protagonist in your agility narrative? Leaders as part of a top down implementation
13:21 Having the type of conversations prior to buying and adopting a methodology
14:24 Does Agile allow for experimentation at team levels? Or is it the structure?
15:54 Do you see Xscale as descaling or as another form of scaling?
16:33 Adopting pattern as an approach to adopting a methodology. Xscale and Disciplined Agile
18:30 Working with people and type of dialogues or the type of conversation that support the scale processes
19:50 Does the type of dialogue impact the end goal?
20:33 Acceptance of constraints outside a team's control
22:08 What needs to happen in the team to leadership conversations for that relationship to be more effective?
23:18 Klaus's theme of agility narrative
24:46 What is your calling in the agile world? A new one every day
25:50 What are the constraints to being able to respond effectively in your responsive adaptive approach?
26:47 What are the constraints that people in the value management office are facing?
28:06 How to manage leads us to key capabilities? And Attention to how we listen?
30:06 Professional judgement - tailoring of frameworks
31:22 What is at stake here? Life and death for an organization.
33:30 What is Klaus's call to action to our group of leaders?
35:12 Summary of Klaus's approach. From where you stand, what are the threats and opportunities you see?
37:53 How do you see us progressing over the next five years?
39:19 End and the Thank You's
39:35 Chatting about various topics

Transcript

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martin: [00:00:00.27] 

Welcome to the Agility Narratives Podcast series. We hold this space so as a community we can listen to leading change makers and enterprise agile leaders talk about their agility narratives. Each narrative we hypothesize is a part that gives us more insight to the whole. We're really pleased to welcome Klaus Nilsson. Initially, your career was centred on project and program management business analysis, and then you embrace PMI and agile tools and methods. You're a prolific author. You have books on Agile, the business case study guides for Agile and RPM certifications, and you run a training and consulting business to know more about Klaus. Please see the show notes. Klaus, we really appreciate you talking with us. Welcome.

klaus: [00:00:45.75] 

Thank you. Thank you for having me here.

martin: [00:00:48.45] 

Course, I'm intrigued to learn more about the early part of your journey toward the work you do. Where in your personal journey did your interest in project and work management begin, and how did that grow into a passion?

klaus: [00:01:02.85] 

I think it started already around university. I came fairly late into university, so I graduated about 20 years ago from the university in Copenhagen and took my part of my master's. I work in project management and kind of more traditional as a student assistant for professor in product management. So I started learning a little bit about product management. After finishing my degree at university, I started working and one of my first job was as the product manager, worked a few years as a product manager, and then after a couple of years, I got the opportunity to go into consulting and work as a freelance consultant for many years, mostly predictive. And around 2012 I went back to the university, worked there while I was there, still doing kind of product management work during the daytime. I'm fairly new to Agile. I came into Agile about ten years ago. I started looking into What is this Agile all about? We taught it at the university on a team level, and I also have some clients where the team team level kind of work. Then it's just expanded.We start looking at what do we do when we have more team. Also, at the same time, did more program management work as a consultant, so it was kind of growing in that direction. And then five, six years ago, we started exploring more about the Agile portfolio side of it at university and also in consulting side of it. And that's starting me to be intrigued about what kind of knowledge that exist there. When I do writing, I mostly write to people like myself because I need it. It's not so much that I want to publish something, but it's mostly because I needed myself and I couldn't find a lot of books on Agile portfolio management. So that's why I thought I'd have to dive more into that. And we had more and more people on courses who had questions about this, what to do. So it's a little bit sort of random and meeting good friends and all those kind of things that actually turned me towards working Agile and PMI. And it was a little bit random in that regard.

martin: [00:03:11.52]

 You had me really at the beginning there when you said predictive. So can you can we go back to that part where in product management and it was predictive, what was that experience? What were the limitations that drew you more towards the agile.

klaus: [00:03:25.53] 

I was working started this small project for a web agency, then turned consulting and did a lot of major products in especially in public sector mostly predictive so was starting out doing a lot of procurement and then have to implement standard I.T solutions in the business. And at that time I thought, okay, predictive, I didn't know so much about Agile at that point. So I'm not one of those kind of early adapters. And then just at some point I start, especially when sitting at university, at the same time I start exploring more. And I think about ten or 15 years ago I wrote my first book on Agile. I'm Agile because we needed one at university, and that kind of forced me to really dive into what you do in terms of on the team level, and that has just been kind of expanding ever since.

martin: [00:04:18.11]

 What was the drivers with the things in the way you were working in product management that made you want to look and made you more curious?

klaus: [00:04:26.63]

 Yeah, there was curiosity for one thing, and then started exploring more of these kind of topics because I didn't use them. I didn't know I was actually missing them. A lot of people was not talking about agile in public sector in Denmark at that point, so I wasn't sure I was missing something. But then I started learning and start playing around with it, see how I could apply it. And then it became to make way more sense for me to use some of it also in different contexts, for example, where I can predictive and then start using more and more of the adult content we'll call that hybrid. Today we are using agile tools and techniques like a retrospective and a predictive environment and have a backlog instead of long software requirement specification. Those kind of it's kind of way of working. We'll probably call that today, but we didn't know that back then.

janet: [00:05:16.70]

 So Klaus, you've mentioned that you published the book I Am Agile in 2013 and you've also brought up terms of Agile portfolio management. Can you provide some base definitions for us and our listeners? What is agile to you and why the movement in Agile practice from project to product?

klaus: [00:05:40.07] 

If I want to start with the kind of definition, the way I try to explain what Agile for me, what Agile is all about, then it's kind of a five step process for me. I take outset in kind of the agile mindset, probably the work by Karl Dweck, those kind of people having a growth mindset or a fixed mindset, that kind of idea. And that's kind of the basic. And on top of that I apply Lean. So all of the tools and techniques you recognize from Lean that is kind of the building blocks for going into Agile. So that's why there's so much to learn about Agile because you need to know, Lean to understand, really understand what Agile is all about. And then when you talk about Agile, for me, the mindset about it is also the the writings about it. That could be the Agile Manifesto, the 12 principles, the Declaration of Independence for modern management, those kinds of things. And then on top of the kind of writings about that, you can start adding, I sometimes call it tools or techniques or practices, so you can use processes and artifacts and rituals, those kinds of things. So for me, I need to be able to trace it back. So when I talk about being agile, working agile, I would like to trace it back to Agile Manifesto, the imprint, those concepts in that regard, to consider it to be agile from from my perspective, but that I know there's a lot of people out there with different opinions on that.And then if we want to change it towards portfolio level, what I see is that people have been working agile on a team level for many, many years. So about at least 20 years people have been working on a team level. What we see around me is that in organization I visited is that agile becomes larger and larger. So we have more and more teams. We can call that programs or value streams or whatever. And then for the last five or six years we have encountered that we have more and more of the big agile transformation where we have a need to manage the whole portfolio. And what I see is that we have a lot of questions in that area how we do that in a good manner because people are used to manage a portfolio and a more predictable environment. And when I start looking into this area, I saw a lot of confusion out there. What is Agile portfolio management, those kinds of things.

janet: [00:08:03.99] 

I'm curious, you mentioned in your description of Agile to US mindset, can you kind of dive in to the mindset? So what is it about Agile that becomes bigger and bigger? Is it the structure? Is it the mindset?

klaus: [00:08:22.73]

 I think if you want to start with the mindset, I think one of the challenges is the mindset doesn't change. We see a lot in research and other places. That Agile transformation fails quite a lot because the culture and management don't change. I think with a lot of organizations are still the old, more traditional kind of mindset. My background is within software. What I see is that software, products or programs becomes bigger and bigger. I see a lot of major transformations in banking, insurance, all other kind of industries. So things becomes bigger and we have a need to how do we manage a lot of people working Agile? And that's one of the fundamental questions that I work with. And right now also looking into what should the product management of all kind of people do to support this journey? I think that's kind of the question a lot of people are asking at the moment. How do we manage this and whether or not you want to call the agile transformation or something else? We have a lot of people working Agile. How do we deal with that?

martin: [00:09:22.71] 

In your book, an Agile Portfolio Management, you have a section of all of the different methods that have been developed to solve this problem. And we had a prior podcast guest, Christopher Avery. He put it beautifully for me anyway. He said, I love best practice. I love the ideas of best practice. But I don't love them as solutions. And we have many, many, many solutions to this problem. Yet somehow it's still not working. Can you talk to a little bit of why you think that is?

klaus: [00:10:04.07]

 I fully agree. See, some of the problems are symptoms when people try to apply these kind of frameworks. That's the kind of questions I get. So you can say that a lot of frameworks of best practice out there, but there's kind of just one kind of market leading product on the market. So I don't know how many options there are if you are a big company. But also what I see one of the challenges is that many organizations are still holding on to some of the things they already have and not fully embracing kind of the new frameworks. So they're not going full heartedly into it. And in my line of work, I'll refer that to you go agile. You have a lot of Agile team, but you're keeping your plan based or predict your portfolio management. That's one of the common application we see in many organizations. They don't want to take in the Agile portfolio management, for example. That could be to some degree part of the solution. But they didn't want that solution for for some reason.

martin: [00:11:03.03] 

So if we take a process, a method, any method, let's pick safe because that's the most most popular or seems to be the most popular scaled agile framework. What in that is not having an agile portfolio management.

klaus: [00:11:21.88]

 If you think about safe, safe, it's usually kind of popular in many organizations. They apply the team level and also they have a lot of teams, but you rarely find any organization who really has applied the portfolio level in safe. And that's what I see is that organization apply a more traditional approach to the portfolio, even though the portfolio is filled with agile development. And that's the challenge I hear from people and practice of what do we do in this kind of situation. It's like going hybrid. You want to combine these things and you want to have the best of both worlds. How do we do that?

martin: [00:11:56.20]

 If we take your agility narrative, which I think you've just framed pretty well in terms of this dynamic between the current methods and good, potentially good processes in place and that people have and people are adopting, but they're not adopting it fully. And there's a there's a missing element here, which is the Agile portfolio management. So in your narrative, who is the protagonist? Who is that central character or concept that drives that narrative?

klaus: [00:12:28.00] 

From my perspective, if you want to go Agile Transformation, the key player here at top management, this is not done without top management being fully in charge of this process. This is so big. So if you want to do really agile transformation, it has to be done top down. We used to do Agile bottom up, but that was small scale. If you want to do really big transformation, it has to be top down. If you go into safe, then you need to really understand what are we saying yes to? What is the then we are back to what is the mindset? What are the principles? Every framework comes with their own set of principles and additional ideas to it. And then we may have some things in common, but this is our way of thinking and working and it's completely different to how we work today. Is that okay with you, those kind of discussions you need to have before applying a framework?

martin: [00:13:21.46] 

There's a lot of complexity in making those level changes. It's not a simple conversation at all. The implications are deep in terms of how we relate, how we structure, how we get stuff done. How do you have that type of conversation and have it meaning without it being a journey that people have to emerge through?

klaus: [00:13:44.47]

 Yeah, I think some of the challenges that organisations do not always have these discussion to the fullest extent before they make a decision on going with a framework. So you can say that on a team level, on any kind of framework or tool you want to use, you need to be sure about what is it that you want to do with it before going out and selecting a tool. Otherwise the tool is going to kind of drive you on how to do things instead of you. When I see why people go with one framework or another, it's based upon references and other big customers, those kind of things. It's not based upon a deep conversation about what the framework is actually all about.

janet: [00:14:24.43] 

So I'm curious because for those of us who have been introduced to Agile through the understanding that there is flexibility, adaptability, and people that are in the team can open it up. Look at emergence possibilities. In your experience, what opportunities have been present for enabling? Yes, we're going to go with the framework, but we will experiment with it. Does Agile allow for experimentation at team levels, or is it more the structure that has driven how the teams will operate with it?

klaus: [00:15:03.55] 

I see a lot. The second part of it that you build in kind of the structure and the governance and the thing is new to many how big the organizational structure around these frameworks perhaps are compared to what they experienced. One of the paradox is that when you scale, you get more people involved, you get more meetings, you get more processes, those kind of things. That's one of the challenges with scaling and people need to understand that. So we have fewer people working on the team compared to other people doing other stuff than we used to in an agile setting. So for many very agile people, these frameworks, they are a little bit opposite of what they actually aiming for. That's why we have a lot of people are shouting this scale, this scale instead of scaling. And that's huge tendency at the moment is people are saying these scale instead of scaling.

martin: [00:15:54.46] 

And you bring up one method called X scale, which you did write about in your book. So would you see X scale as the scaling or would you see it as another form of scaling?

klaus: [00:16:06.29] 

I see that's another form of scaling. I also see it kind of as a toolbox. It brings in a lot of good ideas and thought. I think that could be applied in in many ways, but I don't see it. I know Peter might disagree with me, but I think that I'm not sure whether or not it's mature enough to a big organization to implement it at this point. But I see a lot of good ideas in it and things that could be applied in different settings.

martin: [00:16:33.74] 

One thing I like about X scale is the patterns and the approach. Take a pattern and take a pattern from here. Take a pattern from there. Evolve your structures, don't don't just create your structures. Look at what you want to do. Like if your focus is you need to be fully aligned with your marketplace, find those processes that will align you completely to that, that objective and pick patterns. Maybe some of the patterns from Mexico will work. Some of the patterns from safe would work, some of the patterns from Nexus would work well, maybe create your own patterns that work for you or your organization. What do you think about that less structural approach to scaling?

klaus: [00:17:19.43] 

I think it's amazing. One of my favorite readings at the moment is also all the work done on Agile by my client and Scott Ambler, because they give you a notice on it, mostly on a team level, but they also do programming. We have a portfolio, but they actually show you all the choices you can make and then you can based upon the kind of trade off. Then you can make your own decisions, but you need to be a fairly mature organization to move into that. But that's really interesting. So people can see what are my choices? Do I really have to be this kind of meeting or artifacts or do I have any choices here? And that's really an interesting idea.

martin: [00:17:58.07] 

Yeah. So that's disciplined, agile, right?

klaus: [00:18:00.20]

 Exactly. Exactly. They created a whole framework kind of where they will show you all the decisions you can make and the trade off. If you make this decision or this decision on portfolio level, program of team level, they will show you your options and the trade off like pros and cons, and then you can make your decision instead of coming with a solution. Say, this is one size fits all. So that's quite interesting way to it's much more a lot of people will say that's way more agile in in kind of that perspective.

janet: [00:18:30.51]

 So I'm curious, in all of these options available to you, you can follow the workflow that it has in the book you've just mentioned the resource or the traditional way of going about it. I'd like to get into working with people. Do you have a sense of the type of dialogue or the type of conversation that has been held within Agile and possibly where you might have to look out evolving to be able to support the scale processes that you have been discussing with us.

klaus: [00:19:02.04]

 One of the challenges that from my perspective is that a lot of the work being done within this area is done by commercial industry. Then we have practitioners on the other side and then we have limited research. So everyone is trying to figure out what to do in this kind of sense, the things that it mix up at the moment. Because if you look at the frameworks, a lot of people go into this area, they pick a framework, go by that most of the frameworks on the market are commercial products. And and also if you look at research from my perspective would be that we have limited research on this area. I try to look into what was actually exist and it's actually fairly limited what we know about Agile portfolio management. So we have a lot of people trying to figure out what to do in this field.

janet: [00:19:51.61] 

So for you, does the type of dialogue that you have in teams and then larger structures make a difference to what the end goal is or what the result.

klaus: [00:20:03.31]

 When we talk with people on team level for them. It doesn't change much. So if I have people, okay, you're part of this big, agile transformation. Does it make sense to you? Does it matter that you cannot use the length of the sprint or you have to show up for whatever kind of meetings and such and say no, because we are still going to do the same kind of work we normally do. And the things we are unable to make decision about is fine with us. So people on the team level, I don't think there's sort of it matter that much to them.

martin: [00:20:33.76] 

I give you an example where I think potentially it does matter if you take retrospectives and grandmasters and your coaches will say to to a team, let's just discuss the things that within our control. So we don't end up discussing key issues of things that are impacting us and our ability to improve because we don't have control of them. We have a scaled environment, but we don't have ability to raise issues to help fix that overall environment to make us more effective. And so I think the conversations that happen at the team level are critical. It's just I'm not sure that that we're really listening to the teams in terms of what they're saying often now.

klaus: [00:21:20.72] 

I'm fully agreeing that people discuss retrospective and such in the context they're in, but and I think they will sort of say, okay, this is how it is, and they will have that discussion. And I think but that is whether or not you're part of an agile transformation or you're part of a big organization, that's just how life is. And there are some problems we cannot solve. And that's how I think that's reality. We are we are no longer kind of a small team in a small organization. So I think that reality of scaling and being part of the major organization, there are things that are out of our control.

martin: [00:21:54.47]

 I would like not to accept that.

klaus: [00:21:56.93]

 I fold on this. I fully understand where you're coming from, but I think people need to be kind of pragmatic about it saying and also they focus on what they need to do, get the job done.

martin: [00:22:08.26]

 Can I explore the team to leadership relationship? Can you talk a little bit about that and the conversations that need to happen for that to work more effectively? Because if you talk to teams, they'll say the problem with Agile is the leadership. If you talk to leadership, the problem with Agile is delivery. We have this conflict between the teams and the leadership. Often not in every case, but often. And it's not an open conflict. It's just an underlying conflict that stops people moving forward. Can you sort of talk to that a little bit?

klaus: [00:22:44.90]

 If I look at the team and on leadership, I think this is one of the reasons that more and more major organizations are moving away from being purely agile to more hybrid on a team level because we might be able to fix some of these things if I look at team level. And so I don't think the pure agile way is necessarily the way to go. And that's why we see more and more in hybrid. You see it on team level, we see it on portfolio level. It's becoming more a combination of things to kind of to take the best from. Well, thank you.

janet: [00:23:18.44]

 Given that you're a practitioner in the field and you see these challenges, what would you say your theme of agility narrative is today? And so we're curious about how you describe that.

klaus: [00:23:33.02]

 From my perspective, I take the bits and pieces I mentioned. What does it mean to be agile in terms of the mindset, the lean that the reference work tools and technique? And that's what I take. And then I look into the situation, the context, the in well, I am on a team level, on a program or portfolio level. I look at the context, what is the situation, who are the people, what are the experiences, the culture, this kind of thing. And then from a more pragmatic perspective, I try to make what makes most sense in that situation. Where do I get the most value quickest? So that's how I use it. As a practitioner, I have problems. I need to solve all kinds of things in a fastest manner. A sense is the most effective for me to have the last possible toolbox and ideas to choose between. And then, based upon the situation I'm in, I try to figure out what to do in that kind of situation for that customer and that environment with those kind of people. So for me, it's kind of a pragmatic kind of approach to it. On what to do in a given situation And that's why I am exploring various frameworks and our ideas is to kind of come up with good ideas to various problems.

janet: [00:24:46.52]

 When you wake up in the morning and you think I'm in this agile world, what is it that I meant to do?

klaus: [00:24:53.39] 

My calling or situation or story I'm in? It's almost a new one every day. One day I look at team level thing, another day I look at portfolio thing. At third level, I do training. I'm in all kinds of situation all the time. So for me it's a matter about what kind of knowledge do exist out there to help me in that given situation and given the past, coming from a predictive and now into an agile is because it helped me solve or challenge or do things better, provide more value in the situation I'm in. So for me, it's a practical solution in terms of what to do, and that's in the context I'm in. And that's why we're exploring all kinds of agile, predictive, hybrid frameworks. So figuring out what to do in a given situation. And that's why I'm coming from because I'm faced with all kinds of problems every day as a practitioner.

martin: [00:25:49.43] 

In this narrative of responding in terms of these various different frameworks and thought processes that you have. And what's the challenge to that? Who are the. Barriers to or constraints to being able to do that effectively.

klaus: [00:26:10.22]

 If we look at the portfolio level, you can say the people in the portfolio, they are working, they know what they're doing. So the team level, that's fine. Some of the challenges we see at the moment is, for example, we have a lot of discussion around what should the that a value management office do want to call their product management office, for example, those kind of people who support the people on the portfolio layer. What should those people do? And that's important discussion because they cannot keep doing what they used to do from a predictive environment in an agile setting.

martin: [00:26:46.34] 

What are the constraints that they're facing? Is it just a matter that they are used to doing what they do?

klaus: [00:26:53.66]

 If you are in a major organisation, you will have many portfolios. They will each contain all kinds of projects and programs that you want to manage. Some of them are predictive projects. Some of them are agile projects. And you need to figure out what to do, how to manage them. And one of the challenges at the moment is that some of them are managed in the same manner, even though they are different. If you are an Eagle team and your man is in a more productive manner, you're going to think that is not the most effective way of doing that. That is too much administration for me, too many procedures and such. And you're not going to get the benefit out of the Agile portfolio because you're running it like you do with your protect your portfolio. If you want to go into Agile, you do that because you want to maximize value. Then you need someone to help to make sure that you maximize value. Who should do that? That could be the project management office, for example. If you want to embrace Agile, who should do that? That could be part of that job as the project management office. So you need to move away from controlling kind of perspective and reporting to more about some of these things to recognize from Agile if you're going in that direction.

janet: [00:28:06.67] 

The key thing that I'm hearing here is about how to manage these agile teams or if it's a portfolio team, it's a predictive project, how leads us to capabilities. So we have frameworks and then it's implementation and it's how we do it. And so a key capability that's coming out of research generally in how people work together and implement projects is listening. Do you have a sense that whether it's a project management office, whether it's a value management office or whether it's an agile team, that attention might have to be paid in a new area of awareness to focus on how we listen, to move forward, and what does that look like for you?

klaus: [00:28:53.41] 

If it reframe this, for example, from PMI, they will say this is about combination of way of working and power skills. You can say, do we have the right skills needed to do this kind of work that could be softer skills. Also talked about Agile Excel kind of things that are related to way of working. That could be all the same in terms of how do we want to have that conversation.

janet: [00:29:18.88] 

You've mentioned your skills that are needed to be able to implement the frameworks you see. This is a gap area, a new level of awareness to listening skills so that the teams that are out there working with Agile are actually listening.

klaus: [00:29:35.86] 

But you can tell a lot about how to implement the framework. One of the challenges is when you implement a framework, a lot of people are implementing it the way that the one who produced the framework are telling you how to implement it the best possible way and that is kind of a one approach to it, and that might work for some organization but not for others. So perhaps people should have a more kind of open, I don't know, but they pick a framework because they want to use their best practices that implementing it.

janet: [00:30:06.31]

 If we would take us three and we would say, take this paragraph and what's your interpretation of it? We each have professional judgment, right? Based on our experience, yes.

klaus: [00:30:18.28] 

Sometimes we talk about tailoring or adapting. A lot of people take frameworks in general, so they have to do everything that is stated by the framework instead of doing way more kind of tailoring adaptation of the actual framework. We had the same problem with on a team level for many years with PMBOK and all kinds of things where we have processes and people think they have to do all the processes, use all the tools and techniques all the time. And I think that is kind of the common problem with frameworks is that people think they have to follow from. It's like a cookbook, they have to do everything, otherwise it's not working. And I think we have to be more clear about that. Which of the things can you change and how can you change is like the talk we had about Agile. These are the choices. These are not recommended recommendation. You can change this or that. You should consider this in that order to have that kind of conversation. And then listen to what is kind of your organization saying about how are these things working? Are things important that you listen to your teams because the teams are the one who is doing the deliverables?

janet: [00:31:22.81]

 So what's at stake here for your clients and for the industry? To not see a new way and take action.

klaus: [00:31:32.78]

 If you can say running a project on Agile information transformation is a matter about life and death. If you are big organization, if you want to be the first, the best, the greatest, all this kind of thing, you do Agile transformation, you do projects because you want to go from A to B, and if you're unsuccessful in doing that, it's going to cost you time, money, and it can be very costly for you. So this is hugely important for many organizations. That's why we have top management saying this is what we should do. This is really important. So I think it's more important than ever that we succeed in this.

martin: [00:32:11.95]

 I'm going to throw a stat at you that Peter Merrill often talks about from a very famous Agile survey that's done every year. And it's like 4% of organizations that have done Agile transformation can react to the marketplace effectively. Can you just talk about what you just stated in terms of importance and what's happening with agile transformation and what's at stake here?

klaus: [00:32:41.78] 

So probably the state of our survey you're referring to. But but in general, we see a lot of information about products and generally are failing or not sort of being on time, on budget, on quality, those kind of things. So it's been a problem for for many years for the industry that we're not successful in that manner. And and the, the bigger it goes in terms of scaling, the more difficult it's going to be and the more we have at stake. And that then it becomes even more depressing if we are not succeeding. We already see that we're going to have seen success in many forms and shapes. We also see companies going away from scaling, seeing all kinds of ways. We also see some are working fine, but we see all kinds of situations. But I don't think it's that black and white where we have been suffering for years.

martin: [00:33:30.44] 

So to close this conversation, you're talking to a key group of stakeholders wanting to move their organization forward that say they've done an agile transformation, but they honestly, they feel stuck. You understand their position, you empathize with with that challenges what's going on and what would be your call to action.

klaus: [00:33:52.82]

 From my perspective, you can go in several directions here. One group of people will say the scale instead of scaling. If you can avoid it, if you can break it down, if you can decompose it, if you can scale it, then do that. Because with scaling with more people than come complexity. With more people, you get more procedures, you get more governance, you get more overhead, you move more on way from being agile. And that's kind of the paradox of it. So that is could be one solution, some people would argue could be a way to go.

martin: [00:34:24.62] 

What would your course of action be?

klaus: [00:34:27.08]

 For me, it could also be depending on the kind of the organization or the context, the history, the kind of people they have. If they have been working with ADL for many years, that could be a different way of working and solving. I would probably test it. We are working this transformation, but it's not giving us a full result. But we think we are going in the right direction. I think our general approach is that we want to test and do experiment, so we try to test all kinds of things because none of us have the solutions, but we can try different can go from there. So that could be taking a team or take a smaller piece of the portfolio and then try to test various solution with them, see if we can what we can come up.

martin: [00:35:10.55]

 With makes sense. So I can see from this conversation that you have a very broad knowledge of many methods and many approaches, and you have an adaptive approach to working, whether you're working at the team level, portfolio level, or at the organizational level and mixed in. There is a ton of different methodologies and ideas and good ideas. And even though those ideas were created in the context of particular problems or particular frameworks, you talk about experimenting, about having real conversations about what's needed and what the problems are and which solution to apply. And you admire discipline, agile in that context, and this helps leaders navigate and lead in an uncertain world. So from Denmark today in Europe, how do you see the threats and opportunities your community faces?

klaus: [00:36:11.33]

 I think if we want to look at one of the threats we are facing, I think that information overload, there's so much information out there when if you speak with the normal people, they they are almost fatigue about all this knowledge, all these frameworks is not kind of common knowledge. Now, people get tired of listen to all these frameworks and such. So there's a lot of information out there that people don't know and do not apply. So that's one of the big challenges I see. Also, we have different vocabulary. We call things differently. Those kind of things are a little bit messy. All this area, you might say, and as mentioned, it's very much driven by practices and also industry. So it will sometimes be easier if we have a lot of good research that could point us in a certain direction and I don't see that at the moment. So that's a little bit challenge. People are a little confused of what to do. But on the other hand, I see in terms of opportunities, I see that we are starting more and more having these conversations because for the last almost ten years now we've seen Agile transformation taking place. And at least the last five years, from my perspective, I've seen more and more organizations are trying to come up with all kinds of solution. Having this kind of discussion, we see more and more communities of practices to see more, more work in various cases. So we see more and more knowledge also. So it's a little bit a blend, you might say. We have a lot of information that that people don't know or don't want to listen to. And then we have, on the other hand, a lot of good things are going on. So it's perhaps more more diverse than ever.

martin: [00:37:53.30]

 So how do you see us progressing over the next five years?

klaus: [00:37:57.04] 

I think definitely what we're going to see is some of the main major product on the market is going to be be more mature due to the amount of knowledge that are put into major frameworks. So they're going to be way more mature than they are today. A lot of the frameworks we can choose from are not mature enough today. That will probably change with more people applying these kind of frameworks so they will be more mature, easier to use in that regard. And then I see that more and more organizations are moving up. So you can say you go from at this point, everyone can do Agile on team level, most organization can do Agile on having multiple teams, but not now. We just need to take the final steps so everyone can do Agile on a portfolio level. And that's kind of that's probably what we're going to see in the next couple of years. We're going to see that that we're going to be better of that part of it could be we have we know how to support them. That can be your value management office. So could it be better at value streams, knowledge, those kind of areas that are related that could be useful to know. So I think we're going to see more maturity in that area for sure. So think about going back with the teams that 20 years ago, then we saw multiple teams. We start to solve that one out and now we're moving to the portfolio and we should solve that soon.

martin: [00:39:19.34] 

Thank you very much, because it is a great conversation I really enjoyed having. And thank you, Janet, for all of your beautiful questions.

klaus: [00:39:27.71]

 It's been a pleasure. Thank you for the invite.

martin: [00:39:30.05] 

I just wanted to say thank you for your time today.

martin: [00:39:35.86] 

It was Saturday morning that we did record this podcast with Klaus and at the end we just relaxed him chatting about the various topics. I think the outcome was an interesting couple of observations from Janet and I, so we've added them to the podcast. How well will we apply methodologies? It's easy to buy a methodology and go and implement it. Yes, really hasn't proven effective, so I'm not sure that it's about knowledge. I think it's about application and what this podcast has been about a lot is listening and talking about different types of conversations that people can have that make the application of methodologies effective. Our hope is to get a lot of different people with different ideas together and go through that process of just listening to each other and seeing how it evolves.

janet: [00:40:35.30]

 When you say we have the proposal and it's approved in senior management or post the project, well, what does that mean? But self managing may not be understood. Some see it as a structure and a framework and others that's the process of conversation, right?

martin: [00:40:53.69] 

I think the challenge with methodologies is that all that space is just taken suddenly and you've got one approach. That's the approach.

janet: [00:41:02.30] 

 what capabilities are in the certification process. So holding space for people is not part of that certification process. What I'm hearing is that may be a big gap if you learnt we have the process, but how you implement is holding space for conversation and dialogue and listening and you learn to a new way. A Scrum Master Practitioner as PMI. The end result may be a little different. Methodologies can automatically take the space unless people who are the guardian of the methodology actually have the training.