Agile Outside IT - Agile and Sales

"By following the steps in Scrum, management learned that sales can lend itself easily to an Agile environment. Individuals found that this shared work model led to more consistent revenue and compensation in addition to a more even workload. No longer did the 'sales stars' work much harder than everyone else. Each team member focused on his/her own domain expertise."

This is a lesson learned mentioned in an article by Eric Kristfelt, a sales manager who worked for two Agile organizations. It gives a clear indication that an iterative agile process like Scrum was very helpful for a successful sales team.

Agile has strongly affected Sales and selling in two ways.

The Sales 'Iterative' Process:

First, sales is a process, sometimes described in 7 stages very similar to the waterfall process. This traditional process has become incompetent in dealing with today's fast market changes and fast learning customers. Scott Gillum discusses this deficient traditional process in his article at Forbes: The Disappearing Sales Process. Gillum relates a study which indicates that "57 percent of the sales process just disappeared", because today's knowledgable buyers already do this part on their own before they contact any provider.

Scrum, in this regard, has improved the sales process so much. Team started talking about adopting Scrum in sales, and doing marketing and sales sprints to improve learning about opportunities and customer needs, and improve fast response to customers. In this study, such fast response (when done within 5 minutes) makes the chance for a successful connection 100 times better, and the chance for successful qualification 21 times better!

Sales 'Cross-functional' Teams:

Second, sales traditionally focuses on the individual sales person. Now, thanks to the agile mindset, sales people are talking about cross-functional sales teams! Refer to Eric Kristfell article above for an example how sales cross-functional teams has created a better collaborative and successful environment, and resulted in the best target achieved in the organization. Also, this presentation is very useful example of how agile team roles maps to agile sales team roles.

Finally, I'm quoting Jeff Sutherland, the co-author of Scrum, telling us about this experiment adopting scrum with the sales team of ISence:

"Company revenue increased by 100% after Scrum implementation in the first quarter. Although market changes also contributed to this result, the general manager indicates that at least 50% of the revenue increase can be contributed to the adoption of Scrum"

The is enough for this episode, the next one to come tomorrow insha'Allah, about Agile in Finance and Budgeting :)

Agile Outside IT - Agile Education

Agile is penetrating more and more fields everyday. This is a list of areas which agile have very strong impact nowadays:

• Education
• Sales and Marketing
• Finance and Budgeting
• Strategic Management 
• Manufacturing
• ...

In short, any discipline which leans towards knowledge work will benefit one way or another from the agile values and principles.

This is the first post in a series. In this episode, I will talk very briefly about Agile Education.

Agile in Education:

The first reference is Steve Peha's Article at Infoq: Agile Schools: How Technology Saves Education (Just Not the Way We Thought it Would). What interesting in this article is the the very similar Manifesto for Agile Education which Steve came out with, with minimal changes from it original agile manifesto. Steve has not only mapped the 4 values and the 12 principles, he had also put helpful discussion of team practices which also applies to education!

Another attempt to mapping is done in this workshop by Hala Salah with some school teachers. After introducing them to the Agile Manifesto, Hala has facilitated an exercise with the teachers to come out with a similar value statements for Education. The audience have very smoothly came out with several versions of value statements which reveals the very close correlation between the Agile Manifesto and the field of Education and Study.

The second reference is www.agileineducation.org. Probably, the most notable thing in this website is the Agile Education Compass:

This compass "was created by a group of passionate Agile Educators who met face-to-face at the Scrum Gathering in Orlando, Florida between April 16-20, 2016". What's interesting about his compass is that it describes transformation as a journey from traditional eduction notions which has been in the mindset of educators since long like 'content', 'competition', and 'evaluation' to more appealing and agile notions.

The next episode will be about Agile and Sales. Keep Alert!

Detecting and Preventing Code Clones Mercilessly - workshop guide

Please follow these steps:

First: Open the code project

We will be working on the example project provided by ConQAT:

1. Open Eclipse
2. Goto: New Project > Examples > ConQAT Examples > ConQAT Examples Project

Second: Run the code clones analysis tools

1. Double click the clonedetection-example-junit.cqr 
2. Click Launch ConQAT analysis
3. After it finishes, goto Menu: Clone Detection > Open Clone Report, and select the clones.xml file in the output directory

Third: Detecting exact code clones

1. Back to the clonedetection-example-junit.cqr page
2. Scroll all the way to the right and click the 'New' button
3. Add the field 'equality', and enter value 1 in the threshold
4. Launch the analysis and reload the clones.xml file

Forth: Detecting similar code clones

1. Back to the clonedetection-example-junit.cqr page
2. Scroll all the way to the right and click the 'New' button
3. Add the field 'similarity', and enter value 1 in the threshold
4. Remove the 'equality' parameter
5. Launch the analysis and reload the clones.xml file

Fifth: Detecting gapped clones

1. Goto the 'ConQat blocks' section at the top right of the configuration file
2. Click on 'Change' button
3. Select 'Code Clones > JavaGappedClonesAnalysis'
4. Add a parameter called 'errors' and enter the value = 2
5. Add a parameter called 'gap' and enter the ratio = 0.2 
6. Launch the analysis and reload the clones-gapped.xml file (notice the file name is different than the previous ones)

I'm Speaking at Agile2016

I'm glad to announce that I will be speaking at the Agile Conference - Agile2016 organized by Agile Alliance. This is the biggest agile gathering in the world, featuring more than 2000 attendees and 200 sessions.

I will be running a technical workshop titled: Detecting and Preventing Code Clones Mercilessly, at which I will go through different types of code clones and how to detect and prevent them.

Agile Egypt's 1st Open Space Experiment!

I like to call Agile Egypt's 1st Open Space Conference an experiment rather than a conference. It was really an experiment working in large group without having an agenda :) We were worried while preparing, anticipating and looking around during the upstream activities, but we had a lot of fun and learning throughout the day! It is awesome and unbelievable!

The dynamics of teams while cooperating and engaging in discussions and parallel activities were amazing. Some are moving around from team to another looking for something useful. One team closed up the topic in eager to participate in other one or two sessions before they time out. Two or three attendees had a lengthy side talk about a topic which wasn't on the original list. All of these are some notes of how dynamic and efficient the use of time was.

Let me summarize how it went:

Starting (30 minutes) 

First, we spent sometime explaining the concept of open space technology; the 5 principles and the law of two feet. Then, Mohamed Amr facilitated a group discussion about the topics that may be included during the day:

Sessions (2 hours)

We have split into 6 topics:

1. Self-Organizing teams
2. Agile and freelance developers
3. Requirements in Agile
4. Measuring technical dept
5. Modeling Kanban issues in Diagrams of Effects
6. Agile adoption success stories

Teams in parallel sessions

And this is me facilitating the Kanban modeling session:

To see more photos of this event, browse our event page on meetup.com

Summary of Sessions' Key Takeaways (1 hour)

The last hour was very informative. Each group facilitator prepared a list of key takeaways which he/she shared with the whole audience in 5-10 minutes. Some members found this not interesting, because 1) If they were interested in the topic, they would have participated in the session and 2) the intent was to share key takeaways, while some facilitators narrated parts of the discussions instead :)

What's Next?

I have done a brief evaluation at the end of the conference. All Attendees would like to attend similar meetups again. Most of them (about 60%) gave 4 and 5 (out of 5) to their learning experience in this meetup.

I have observed how dynamic the meetup was. Learning is guaranteed! If you disliked a topic, you can instantly switch to another, which is several steps away. The fact that we are all co-located made the movement so easy.

We are planning to do it again inshaAllah with one minor tweak: we will have one or two sessions predefined and announced in order to attract more audience. One of the things that makes people reluctant to attend is the fact that he doesn't know what the topics are!

Although this is done on purpose (not announcing any topics), we think that announcing one or two topics would be a catalyst to attract more people. Once they are in, they can switch to any topic anytime!