How to stay agile while working remotely

 Like most teams across Singapore, M1’s staff members made the shift to working from home during the circuit breaker period. Whilst it was a significant adjustment for all of us, it has been an exercise that has proven the importance of digital tools, cloud technologies and creative collaboration while social distancing.

To support our teams in continuing to work towards our goals, we’ve encouraged them to use a variety of technologies, including online collaborative tools that help staff members stay nimble through cross-team ideation and problem-solving while working remotely, and have provided educational workshops on remote working methods and techniques, such as SCRUM, which encourages teams to “sprint” while working on different aspects of a project together and ensure achievements are seen in weeks rather than numerous months.

In addition, all our teams working from home were equipped with hardware that included the software suite available at the office. Though a critical piece of technology for everyone, few software suites are a perfect fit for every employee and situation – especially when working remotely as a complete organisation for the first time. To bridge the new gaps our teams were experiencing in working from home, they worked together to tackle how best to fill gaps and communicate with each other. Through this, they have found innovative and fun solutions and share them with the wider team.

For example, our Digital Apps & Platforms  team, led by Nicole Cheah, has adopted a hybrid approach to enable her team’s mode of communication, track work progress and drive remote collaboration by using a blend of enterprise suite of software and social apps.

Still, teams are experiencing some challenges while working remotely. “I’ve received feedback that people felt as if they were trapped in a borderless time and space realm where they were unable to logout from work,” Nicole said. “The lack of division of ‘on work’ and ‘off work’ status because people were at home ultimately prolonged their working hours.”

To help her team balance their time more evenly and work sustainably, Nicole has encouraged everyone to work the usual office hours – which includes taking a lunch hour and respecting everyone’s time by not scheduling meetings outside of work hours as much as possible.

Beyond the challenge of balancing work and life when always at home, Nicole’s team also misses the social aspects of the office. “I do miss face-to-face interaction and informal conversations,” Lau Seng Keat, a team member from the Digital Applications and Portals team said. “I feel like in-person communication really helps to uplift the team spirit.”

To recreate the feeling of in-person interaction while social distancing and working remotely, Nicole and her team check-in with each other every morning to chat about work. They also have a dedicated channel for sharing non-work thoughts, articles, and memes, get together virtually on Fridays to wind-down the week, and have held birthday celebrations online.

This is just one example we can share and overall, Nicole and her team feel as if they are working well together and have been able to remain productive while working remotely over the circuit breaker period. “Our team is passionate about digitalization,” Nicole said. “We are adopting a growth mindset, and we believe in being the digital change agent to inspire our M1 teams to develop, grow and win as one team.”

We know there are still aspects we need to improve and therefore we won't be viewing these achievements as completed but merely providing insight for our next steps. Our new objective is that when we are able to all work in the office again many of the collaboration and productivity tools will continue to be used so that we realise a “win-win” outcome of personal interaction with some exciting new digital capabilities to support our team members and realise achievements on a more regular basis for the foreseable future. Our new approach to collaboration and transparency on productivity might have started from being “stuck” at home, however it will be one of the positive new capabilities for our team when we are back collaborating together as physical instead of only virtual teams.

The Achilles’ Heel of the Digital Era is…Us

Wow, so there we all were in early 2020, across the globe, slowly embracing digital (yes, some faster than others) and accepting that every aspect of our lives was going digital. But with the global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital is now the “norm’. It’s how we are consuming content, buying products, and ordering meals and “party packs” (apparently these are a thing now!). At a time when physical connection has become impossible in many ways, digital businesses are enabling our lives and our connections in new ways. Though businesses in our global economy have sought to optimise supply chains, many assumed that call centres, and logistics and distribution centre operations were fine as they were. The human dependency for all of these could not be more visible than it is today. Now, people’s lives are impacted by whether or not they can quickly receive the products they order through digital channels, and businesses have had to adopt digital capabilities fast in order to adapt to new ways of working.

I was initially surprised –and later realised I should not have been – when seeing the breadth of this impact even on digital native businesses. Digital native firms were informing customers that the usually responsive customer service they provide would not be available as the call centre locations were closed. Equally laptop demand could not be met because so many firms were looking to specific markets that develop chip sets to keep costs as low as possible, this has impacted the availability of not only laptops, but servers and other digital-supporting infrastructure. Additionally, many businesses rushed to enable staff to work from home to minimise productivity losses whilst also seeking to implement security measures and the ability to measure staff performance. Rapidly doing this in the context of a crisis has proven a significant dilemma that is still ongoing for many businesses even today.

All of this goes to show that the current COVID-19 restrictions have demonstrated for any business looking to “be digital” that the human factor has proven to be the Achilles’ heel as evidenced by degradation in service, the impact on productivity and, in some cases, complete shut downs.

What is interesting to note is this type of global disruption does not usually sit high on the radar for digital transformation, transformation is usually about enabling the next wave of growth, not protecting existing business flows. The likelihood of there being a global pandemic is so rare that the need for a call centre to close, or for a distribution hub to ramp down, or for businesses to diversify their supply chain was near zero – until now. That said, the warnings about global pandemics have been shared with us previously, and particularly in a great 2015 TED Talk presentation by Bill Gates about how the next battle would not be on a field but actually in a Petri dish (yes, I am paraphrasing here). I’m sure the implications of this were never fully appreciated by many of us (me included).

So where are we now? Well, many people are talking about a “new normal”, where we will change the way we connect as humans and where digital enablement of businesses will occur faster than ever before. The diversification of supply chains, the virtualisation of call centres, and the permanent setup for work from home minimises future risks, but also potentially mitigates future costs as many businesses realise large offices may no longer be needed and instead just offer touch down zones when people “visit” from their home office.

I am not sure going to these extremes permanently is the right thing to do. Whilst I do encourage businesses to look at digital holistically so they can be ready for future impactful events, its important that we don’t lose sight of the most valuable aspect of being human: our ability to connect. This human connection is something that is feeling disrupted now and while Video calls are trying to fill the void, in my opinion they can never replace the real world value of connecting with others.

At M1, we had already started our digital transformation journey, though the path we set for ourselves is no longer about preparing for the future but also the new normal. Hence, we need to keep driving our transformation outcomes as fast as we can with the knowledge that the gradual transition we expected is likely to happen a lot faster than we thought. We must become a digital telco so that we can serve our customers, partners and our people in the best possible way. This doesn’t mean everything becomes driven by a machine – it means all our people are in roles that are adding value to our customers and to each other as colleagues. It means we are creating capabilities that strike the right balance between empowering our customers to live in the digital era with the right support tools; and ensuring that we leverage the value of human interaction where it makes sense.

When we exit these pandemic restrictions, we need to ensure that we do not end up with a mantra of digitalising all aspects of our lives. Instead, let’s make sure we are ready to respond when disasters strike so that businesses, governments and all of us as individuals can continue to be effective. In fact it is the collaboration across business, government and the public at large that can ensure we are aware, have the right framework to respond and people have the right working environments to continue to support our economy. We must always ensure though that any intervention, preparation or change in working environments, should always be temporary and that human connection is what will ensure digital adds value to our lives rather than meaning we spend the rest of our lives looking at screen(s).

Humans are the reason businesses exist - it's our needs that create demand and markets to serve. While many businesses will see the human factor as the  Achilles’ heel of digital – that is to say a dependency - when we look to the future let’s ensure that the Achilles’ heel  actually becomes the strength that allows us, businesses and the community to leap forward and see the true value of digital through human eyes, not machines. #staysafe #stayhealthy

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31956344

https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_the_next_outbreak_we_re_not_ready?language=en 

How Fragile is Agile?

I have been reading a lot of articles lately about whether Agile actually works, or whether it’s simply a dream for businesses looking to accelerate business outcomes. Ultimately, the growing view seems to be that Agile doesn’t work – that it is a hype that consulting firms are thriving on, and we’re actually better off going to traditional delivery methods that provide predictability, consistency and the ability to hold someone accountable to get things done.

This debate stems from a need to find the ‘magic answer’ – the silver bullet to take all of our worries away, especially when we are looking to transform. We like Waterfall because we can allocate responsibility to someone else, whereas Agile requires us to get more involved through evolving design, constant prioritisation, showcase presentation, and ultimately owning the outcome (scary stuff). Waterfall means I can document everything I want and then point to someone else to deliver the outcomes. Any delays, errors or increased costs are totally on them, right? (ahem). However, with Waterfall delivery we tend to forget the wonderful concept of change request, where it tends to have a growing number of change requests over time, and then finishes with a resignation of taking what can be delivered with the remaining budget. Now, some might say that if you plan things right you don’t need change requests, but in today’s era of constant change, avoiding it is challenging, to say the least. Historically, in a market where market change was measured in years and for the most part manual (or at best, half yearly) the scale of change was manageable, today however, we are faced with two types of businesses: those that were born digital and those that aspire to become digital. In this dynamic, the extent and scale of change is huge and the challenges this brings to Waterfall delivery means we constantly ask for changes to our delivery plans to evolve with the market.

On the other hand, Agile provides a degree of unpredictability and tends to shift directions based on the priorities set by the business and, more specifically, the product owner themselves. The timing of when a specific capability is completed can be a little vague, as the definition of ‘done’ comes down to when the product owner is actually happy with the capability, and whether they feel it’s fit for purpose. While there can be a desire to go fast with Agile, the concept of minimum viable is always in the eyes of the product owner and thus velocity is determined by the business. For those looking to test in-market quickly, you could achieve a faster launch, but with the knowledge that there might be errors or adjustments to make ongoing. For others who like a capability to be holistic and low risk, it can mean numerous sprints are necessary before it is deemed “done” and as such ready to share with colleagues and / or customers.

I am not going to say that Agile is faster or cheaper – in fact, it can be more ambiguous, frustrating, and lack accountability, which ultimately means there’s no one to point the finger at in pushing toward an outcome. However, this is also why I believe Agile is our future.

Agile represents the cultural change a business needs to go through. We need to be comfortable with a degree of ambiguity and we need to share ownership of the outcome. One aspect that Agile does outperform Waterfall on is the ability to learn faster – and if a business is willing to learn through quick tests and recognises that early failures ensure a program is on the right track overall, then Agile can be a great vehicle to achieve business outcomes. My concern is that Agile has been branded in the tech market as a vehicle to move faster, which means the expectations are wrong from the get-go. Agile will help you learn faster and pivot as the needs of the business evolve or the market drives change, which can create a sense of speed, however it is simply an ingredient in the recipe for broader business agility.

The challenge we keep facing is that our world is not the stable working environment it was before. The predictability of having a three-year outlook that could merely be followed through with minimal disruption is rapidly diminishing, with software that felt more like hardware because it was very much standalone and constant. Today, change doesn’t happen in a two or three-year cycle; it’s happening in months and, if you are really unlucky, in weeks. This is why Waterfall is struggling, as the changes we need to make means we would need to constantly raise change requests and our costs keep going up.

This doesn’t mean I have suddenly prescribed to Agile as being the answer to everything, but it’s about knowing what has the right outcome for your business. If you are doing a migration to the cloud of premise-based applications with fixed scope and deliverables, then Waterfall is likely a better path. On the other hand if you’re developing capability that you know will continue to evolve, then Agile can actually help drive a better outcome.

So, to answer the question in the headline of this article, Agile can appear fragile because it means accepting that we are all accountable for its success. When we struggle to accept ambiguity, the need to change the way we work, or accept joint accountability in partnership of realising outcomes, we make the process fragile.

All of this is simply leading to one key reason - We are the reason why Agile is fragile. We don’t like change, we don’t like being responsible for things which in a traditional IT world was always the ownership of others. In fact, I remember my first project with Agile ways of working, I was constantly asking the delivery partner if this is going to work. My big realisation was when one of the team leads from the delivery partner turned to me and asked me back, “I don’t know, you tell me.” After my heart skipped a couple of beats, I realised this was the difference, and what I didn’t like was that there wasn’t the same clarity that I felt I had before. On the other hand, following our initial delivery, I realised it was that constant ability to keep improving, evolving our tools and external facing systems that was giving us the ability to continue to evolve.

I look at Agile as being a reminder that the business needs to take accountability for the delivery of projects. The time of simply pushing the problem to someone else is over. The introduction of Agile has added another tool to our bag to support our business in become increasingly digital. In doing this, we can enable the business to be less fragile and more adaptable, innovative, disruptive, and, well, agile.