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The Agile Within
Providing agile insights into human values and behaviors through genuine connections.
The Agile Within
Building Agile Communities of Practice that Last with Alina Thapliyal
What does it truly take to build a thriving Agile community?
Scrum Master Alina Thapliayl from Arbergen, Germany, joins us to share her unique perspective. In our engaging conversation, Alina outlines the persistence and adaptability required to sustain an Agile community while keeping the focus on the collective needs rather than individual ambitions. She enriches the dialogue with her firsthand experiences of creating a vibrant and safe space for collaboration and learning, and offers a refreshing metaphor by comparing the exhilarating challenges of Agile to the breathtaking view from an aerial glider.
Launching a community of practice within an organization is no small feat, and this episode unpacks the essential steps to get started. We talk about the critical need for a clear vision, securing the necessary buy-in, and effectively publicizing these initiatives without making unrealistic promises. Our discussion delves into the importance of inclusivity, the right tools for remote and in-person gatherings, and even the power of sharing a meal to forge deeper connections. We also stress the importance of a code of conduct to foster an environment ripe for motivation and knowledge exchange, ensuring meetings remain positive and productive.
Feedback is a lifeline for any community, and Alina emphasizes its role in adapting meetings to better serve members. In the long run, strategies like creating accessible internal resources and sharing success stories can significantly enhance community engagement and learning. As the episode concludes, there's a heartfelt acknowledgment of the teamwork and camaraderie that made this discussion possible.
Connect with Alina on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alina-thapliyal/
Check out the airfield club in Aarbergen:
https://www.fcaarbergen.de/verein
https://www.fcaarbergen.de/fliegen/mitfliegen
Follow us on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-agile-within
Welcome to the Agile Within. I am your host, mark Metz. My mission for this podcast is to provide Agile insights into human values and behaviors through genuine connections. My guests and I will share real-life stories from our Agile journeys, triumphs, blunders and everything in between, as well as the lessons that we have learned. So get pumped, get rocking. The Agile Within starts now.
Speaker 1:Before we dive into today's episode, I'd like to take a moment to thank our sponsor, impact Agility. Impact Agility specializes in training and coaching through scrumorg and proconbonorg, empowering teams with cutting-edge tools and techniques. Their classes are designed to deliver actionable insights, whether you're a scrum master, agile coach, delivery manager or organizational leader. Whether you're a scrum master, agile coach, delivery manager or organizational leader, at the helm is president and founder Matt Domenici, who has guided over 50 organizations toward professional agility. With his hands-on experience, matt helps teams and organizations take ownership of their processes and outcomes, unlocking their full potential. To explore free learning resources, check out their training schedule or book a free consultation, visit impactagilityco Once again. That's impactagilityco. Well, hey there. Welcome back to another episode of the Agile Within. This is your host, mark Metz. Today I have a guest who is also a friend. We've stayed in touch for several years now. She is a scrum master from Arbergen, germany, and her name is Alina Taplea. Alina, welcome to the Agile Within.
Speaker 2:Hi, mark, thank you.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's a pleasure to have you just enjoy getting to know you over the last year or so, probably more than that, probably been three years at this point. So, alina, our typical icebreaker question if I were coming to arbergen, germany, for a day and I've never been there before what's one thing that you would say that I couldn't miss doing?
Speaker 2:Oh, so you need to imagine that Arbegin it's like a village in hill area with a lot of forests, so you don't want to miss taking a walk into the forest. There's like special path. We can wander off if you want to. If you really really are lucky, there are a couple of days a year there is an airfield here. You can take a trip in one of these old airplanes with the two propellers. They will fly around the area and you can ask to fly over your house so you can see everything from top. To fly over your house so you can see everything from top. And if you are really really courageous, you can go into a fly, into a glider, so there'll be a plane taking you up and then the plane detaches from the glider and then you just glide around the village. So that'll be something that it's done a couple of times a year. I wouldn't miss that. I love flying.
Speaker 1:So have you done both of those?
Speaker 2:I have done just the flying with the airplane because my husband picked the glider, so next time probably we'll switch.
Speaker 1:Wow, I bet you have some amazing pictures from that.
Speaker 2:I do, I do, and it's amazing how you can see everything from a different perspective, which is always something that we try to do also in our work. To see things from different perspectives from top to the big picture yeah, Wow, you're always thinking agility.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it, alina, I love it. Well, the title for our episode today is Building Agile Communities of Practice that Last. I'm very interested to hear about this, and I want to hear a little bit more from you, alina, about what does it take to make an agile community that lasts versus one that doesn't?
Speaker 2:Oh, it takes a lot of will, willingness to continue when things get a little bit difficult. When the turnover, we had a time when there were just five people join in. Usually they are like 20, 30 people. So you need to have the will to continue to go beyond these things to see how you improve, to see what you can do different, to get feedback from community, to see what else you can do to help them, because the community you build this for them, not for you. So I would say that this will which started everything.
Speaker 1:And how would you define an agile community of practice?
Speaker 2:I would say how we defined it, because I didn't build this alone One of the luckiest person and I'm really really happy that I was able to build this with a few of my colleagues. For us, it is a place, so we really wanted to have a place where people can come in, can learn about everything. Hl can practice things, because you don't want people to come and just take notes, you know, like in school, and then go back to their work. You want them to practice. You want them to come there to practice methods firsthand. You want a place where they can share their success. Maybe somebody started or did a retrospective after working 20 years in Waterfall. That's a success. It's a really small step towards in the right direction. We wanted to have the place where people who are interested to learn, to exchange idea, to share experience they can come there. It's a safe space. It's fun. We also wanted to make it fun for people to come. So this is what I would say it's a community of practice.
Speaker 1:Well, I understand you have 11 different steps for building an agile community that lasts, so I'm interested to jump into this. So why don't you tell us a little bit more about the first step?
Speaker 2:Like I just mentioned earlier, we wanted to have this place for people to come together to learn, to learn from each other, to share experience. But the way it started in our case is just me and a couple of colleagues. We met and we said hey, I heard that some other departments are using Scrum or Kanban. How do we find these people? How do we learn from them, how they can learn from us? And then it came the idea let's build the community of practice. So I think, the moment you start in really to have a strong vision, a goal, why? Why do you want to start? It's because it's going to be difficult. There will be times when people will be sick, there will be holidays, there will be less turnover, and you need to have this motivation to keep you going to go through all these challenges.
Speaker 2:So I can already hear Simon Sinek in my ears saying start with why, exactly, exactly, have a why.
Speaker 1:All right, so step two.
Speaker 2:Step two would be my advice is not to do it alone. Now it depends how big your organization is. Maybe it's just one, two teams and you can handle that, but maybe it's a really big organization. So you need to check in your organization, see how big it is, and it's always good to have someone with you, and the reason I'm saying this is because it brings balance to have someone with you. And the reason I'm saying is because it brings balance. It brings balance in the sense that I am a person who would learn a method, would see in a podcast, listen to something and want to tell everybody about it, or let's teach them, or let's show them. Everybody needs to know this because it's so cool.
Speaker 2:But then my colleagues say hold on. They say let's check our reality right, let's see where we are right now. Can we do this right now, doing this with someone? First of all, if you're alone, you're like a single point of failure. Right, when you are sick, then that's it. You need to cancel the meetings. But if you have someone with you, it's support, it's encouragement, you can share things, you can learn from each other, and it brings this balance and you have these different perspectives of how you can do it, how you can make it better, how you can make a difference. Find someone to do this with.
Speaker 1:When you say, don't do this alone, of maybe bringing someone alone that ended up didn't having the same vision or the same values that you had one alone that ended up didn't having the same vision or the same values that you had so far.
Speaker 2:No, but we had someone who didn't have the time because he started doing some other type of work, and you need to consider this. This would be something that you do extra along with your main tasks, that you do every day. You need to decide how much time can I involve? And, again, it's good to have someone maybe where they can pick up when you don't have the time to do it. We share this together and we had some colleagues who are more involved at some times or less involved at some other times.
Speaker 1:I think that's really important, because it's easy to get very excited about things like this. So you have people that are, I could say, would be, very eager to sign up, but then, when it comes time to actually making the commitment, other things get in the way. That can be kind of sticky, but sounds like you have a good handle on it. You have multiple people working with you that you can depend upon. All right, well, I want to keep the pace moving here, so move us on to step three.
Speaker 2:The steps. Three is it's not a mandatory, let's say, step, but it can happen. So it's something that you need to check in your organization. You need to see do you need an approval to build a community of practice? If you are new to the company, try to talk to the senior colleagues, try to talk to your managers, try to see is there something that needs to be really official, where you need to get approval up to the managing director, or is this something like you just send an email? Hey, let's meet up and talk about agile, checking the organization, how things are, and if you really need one, just do whatever it takes to take it.
Speaker 1:I'll add my two cents on that as well and that maybe sometimes you don't need to wait and ask for approval and you just do it and let cards fall where they may.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and if the snowball gets bigger, bigger than can be stopped anymore?
Speaker 1:Yep, that's right. That's right, but I understand you do have to be sensitive about those type of things. Yeah, all right. So just a real quick recap. We talked about having a vision. We talked about getting support, not doing it alone, checking to see if you have to have approval, what's next?
Speaker 2:Oh. Next is you need to start it right. So let's say, you have all the approvals, you have the vision, you have someone to do this who is next to you, so you need to start it. So how do you start it? The way we did it, we did a kickoff meeting, but before that, you need to let people know that this is happening.
Speaker 2:It can be in small organization that you go from door to door and say, hey, we're going to build this, or maybe I don't know a water cooler or when having a coffee in the morning. But with big organization, you need to be more strategic. You need to have a strategy how you do that. It's either you write an article on your intranet or whatever websites your company is using, or maybe official meetings where all the employers are there. You want to get a part there where you can talk about the community practices. Most important is that you do not need to over-promise. You know, like whoa, as of tomorrow, you're all a bit agile, right, it's stay humble, you know. Use all the communications means that you have in your company and make it simple. Make it simple for people to reach you. You don't want them to fill in forms or send you I don't know how many emails or whatever. Make it really simple for them to come and join a kickoff.
Speaker 1:All right. Step number five has to do with tools. Tell us about the tools.
Speaker 2:Oh yes, without tools. What do we do without them? So you need first of all to think will this be online meetings, remote, because they need different tools or will they be in person? If they are in person, then you need to think you need to have a room which you can book. You need to check in your organization when they are available, how often they are available. You need to consider to have toolbox with I don't know sticky notes or whatever you need for that.
Speaker 2:For remote, you need different things. You need like a software. You need a good software where you can have these meetings. You need a good software where you can have these meetings and, most important, you need to realize that people coming to this community of practice meetings there will be introverts, extroverts, all people you know, and you need to have a way to give them the possibility to share their opinions. So you might want a tool which gives you the possibility to have breakout rooms, because there are some people who speak easily when they are in smaller groups. So you need to take that into consideration. Also, you want to have like a collaboration tool like Miro Miro there are so many out there. So see in your organization if you have these tools if you get licensed for these tools, whatever tools the organization have which you can use. But take into consideration this fact that there are all types of people coming there and they all need to be heard, so you need to have tools that can help you do that.
Speaker 1:I'll give you a tool that you didn't mention, that you may not have thought about, and if you have an in-person meetup, food is a good tool.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah. Food coffee yes, that can bring the spirit up and make it more fun and more engaging. Or more turnover right. Free cookies yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. So we've talked about vision, we've talked about not doing it alone, getting approval, we've talked about publicizing it and we've talked about tools. What's next?
Speaker 2:Well, there is something which is really dear to me. It's a code of conduct. I would not recommend starting this meeting without having a code of conduct, and I'm sure that almost every company has its own code of conduct, so maybe you can familiarize yourself with that. If you haven't read that, or if you don't know that before, you need to make it simple. By this code of conduct, what I mean is you want to avoid that these meetings will become a place where people just come and complain, right, you know everything is bad, everything is not working the way we want to this person, that person, this tool, that tool, this framework, that framework.
Speaker 2:You also don't want this place to be like a framework war. You don't want to start that. Right. It's not about who is right or wrong, it's about sharing experience. So, maybe someone did use Scrum differently, but if it worked and if it got them the results that they wanted, they share that experience. Right.
Speaker 2:And you want this place to be a place where you can share knowledge, where you can create value. When people, they live motivated, they say, hey, this is not so difficult, I can take that and use it in my team. It's easy. I did it here once, right? So you want people to live motivated to practice new methods, and you also need to say upfront that you will not tolerate negative behavior right that. No racism of any form. You need to specify that.
Speaker 2:And I think what is most important, you can even start with the scrum values here, right, and you know respect and openness. But it's important that in every meeting, what we did is in the first kickoff, we said this is our code of conduct. We wrote it also in our intranet page, but in every meeting we have it there. We don't read it because people know it by heart and they'll say hey, we know that you don't need to read it anymore, right, but we have it there In case someone forgets it's there and they can relate to it. So have a code of conduct, set up some rules. This is who we want to be, this is what these are our values.
Speaker 1:And it's want to be.
Speaker 2:This is what these are all values, and it's kind of like a working agreement a little bit deeper than a working agreement a little bit deeper, you know. But yeah, how do we gonna work here? How do we talk to each other? What is not acceptable, what is what is acceptable?
Speaker 1:Yeah, All right, just giving a brief pause here, I'll edit this out. All right, so we've got our code of conduct down. What's the next step then? Alina?
Speaker 2:no-transcript. I would recommend they need to have a regular meeting, maybe per week, or depends how you build your community, where you need to stay focused on your goal right. Remember the why from the beginning, what we created is Agile Community Backlog with topics we want to talk about, which we either suggested or it came out as a feedback from community. Somebody came and said, hey, let's talk about a retrospective next time. Say, well, great, let's do it. And so you have this backlog that you work on, and what I would recommend over every single meetup is to have a small retrospective. It doesn't need to be very big. But hey, what did you observe? Because we are four organizers and many times when we go in a breakout rooms, one of us is there like a facilitator and we pick up from every room like, how was the atmosphere? Could everyone talk? Did everyone have time to say their mind or their thoughts? Was everyone engaged enough? And so these retrospectives they help enormously of how you can build the next meeting. How can you make it better?
Speaker 1:All right, so stay organized. Having a backlog, that's very nice Absolutely.
Speaker 2:What's very nice Absolutely.
Speaker 1:What's next.
Speaker 2:Next is so you have the community right. You have a kickoff, people came in, you learn who they are, you found out what they want to do in the community. So now it's to keep it going right, because kickoff alone is not enough. You need to keep it going. So our question is how do we involve? How do we involve the members of the community here? Because, as I mentioned earlier, we didn't want something that one of us, the organizer, will talk one hour about a topic, everybody will take notes and then they'll go home, right. So how do we involve them? So there are many ways to involve. Either you can ask for help, like maybe someone knows how to update the intranet site or SharePoint or Confluence. Maybe they will have half an hour a week to do that for the community, you know. Or maybe they want to facilitate one of the meetings with you. Or maybe they are just curious to see how do you prepare the meetings. I want to be there and I want to see. Or maybe someone has a really great method that they want to share with the community so they can do that.
Speaker 2:You want to have these conversations with the community every time you meet to see how open they are for these things, who has time, who wants to get involved and always give options. You know, don't just keep it to yourself, because it's not about you to show how good you are. It's to give this, to create this space, to bring people in the community to show how great they are, how successful they are. I would say you need to pay attention to introverts, extroverts, to give them space, tools for everyone to say their opinions. Keep in mind of the code of conduct, right, it's not a battle of frameworks, and you can involve people by using visuals, by using check-in. In every hour meeting we use a check-in and it's not always because we want to make the meetings fun, but also because we want people to experience these check-ins here, this exercise. They can pick them and use them into their teams, with their teams. So it's always involvement and this is the constant questions that we ask ourselves how we can involve them.
Speaker 1:So one interesting thing that I've observed on this topic is that individuals are different, but groups can kind of form their own identities. You may have some groups that are very outgoing and just they have a great mind of speaking up, getting involved, giving ideas, and then you have others where people are much more reserved. Yeah, and even when you have those groups where people are sharing, you have lots of ideas that are being formed and shared amongst each other. You still have those individuals that are just more on the quiet side, and so what I have found, alina, is that sometimes you have to reach those type people one-on-one.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And when you reach out to them one-on-one and you start talking and building a relationship, then the ideas from them start going. It's like, wow, why did you not bring that up in the group? And you know, some people just aren't comfortable doing that and maybe you have to be the person to say, hey, would you mind letting me be the proxy? Can I be the person on your behalf, if you're not comfortable sharing to bring that to the group, because I think that is an absolute wonderful idea. So that would be something I would say to leave put in your bag of tricks is to, in that involvement, still have that one-on-one relationship with the individuals in your community, because that's where you can really get some great ideas. So we talked about involvement. The ninth step is about feedback. Yeah, so you step is about feedback.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you want feedback from community, you want to crave feedback from community. So you need, in every meeting and this is what you can ask the committee how often do you want us to meet? Do you want us to meet every week, every month, once a year? I don't know, hopefully not, but you need to ask them because everybody has their daily tasks, schedules are busy, calendars are full of meetings, so you want to give them the possibility to say, hey, once a month for now is okay. Or maybe, hey, everybody is learning now and we really want this every week because here we want to practice, practice, practice. So you need to get this feedback from the community. How often do you want to meet? Which tools do you want to use? Do you want tool A or tool B? Which one is more easy for you?
Speaker 2:You also want feedback on the topics that you bring up, and what we did is in every meetup, we in our boards because all our meetups happens so far online is we have a section for feedback and every time we ask different questions, but mostly it's what have I learned today? Or feedback for the organizing team what can they do different? Or feedback for the next meetings? What topics do we want to reach? It was really interesting.
Speaker 2:Sometimes someone came to us and said hey, I noticed something and I don't think you have noticed that. We say, oh, wow, that's amazing. So it helps to have this, help to create this community of practice, because they also come with their own observations. But if you don't ask the community for feedback, you might miss out on many other things which you can't possibly see, because you are either focused on oh my God, next stopping in this meeting or the next step, and so on and so forth. So it's really important to make this open. Give us feedback, we are okay. Give us any type of feedback, we are happy with everything. Let's learn from each other.
Speaker 1:So, alina, what do you do when you're asking for this feedback? But you're getting feedback that differs, and people may be very passionate about the opinions that they're giving you and they don't agree.
Speaker 2:I believe you can. Most of the time. It depends on the feedback on the topic is you can either go with the majority, for example, or if you see that maybe someone said I really want this every week. I know here we have decided it that once a month is enough, but for me it is not. Then what we do as Scrum Masters, HR coaches, we say, okay, let's meet separate, let's meet some other time. How can we help you? There was some colleagues who needed help with retrospective and I said, let's organize a meeting, just one-on-one or one and the colleagues who needed that, and let's talk about retrospective. And how else can we guide you? And some colleagues came and said, hey, I'm not so sure if I can run a retrospective, but would you come in our team and do this with us, Because we never done this before? So we are not there just to organize this meeting, but to support the community. When they need our know-how, our experience, when they need our time, we are there to help them.
Speaker 1:What I'm hearing is I think that's a great way to get involvement. Also is, if you have some people who may not agree to say, oh, that is a great point that you brought up. We don't really have anybody that's used to facilitating a retrospective in a community of practice, would you be willing to do that, because that's what you want, right? You want the people that have the passion to do something to bring that in, not have them, so you're playing to their strengths.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you want people to bring their best right, and you want people to come here and bring their best. I mean to make them stressed about it, right, but what I mean is that if they feel that they can do it, we give them the chance, the space to do it.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, Okay, what's after feedback?
Speaker 2:Well, after feedback is like, you really need to think on a long term. So you have this backlog of items, you have feedback from community, you have a lot of things you want to talk about in the community of practices, a lot of methods that you can learn from each other, but you really need to think of a long term. Initially we said, ok, after every meeting, we send up a wrap up email, but you know that the email would end up in another pile of thousands of emails which we get every single month. So, thinking long term, what we did is we created our own internal site, website with a company where we put every single meeting there, with the link to the mirror boards or to the concert boards, with the link with the documents we use and because it's much easier to educate them.
Speaker 2:Here is the site where you can find everything about our community. You don't need to search emails. You don't need to search emails, you don't need to search other stuff. Here you find everything a place. We have our vision, our code of conduct, our mission. We have book recommendations, podcast recommendations, who wants to read. We have methods that we have used so far. We have detailed them there one more time. We have methods that we have used so far. We have detailed them there one more time. So, thinking long-term, I would say it's okay to send a wrap-up email after that, but these get lost very fast, so have one place to put everything. So they know it's there.
Speaker 1:Okay, step 11. We're at the end.
Speaker 2:Step 11. Oh, close to the end, I would say you need to allow this place to be a place where people can share their success stories. It's about learning, it's about exchanging ideas from each other. It's about practicing, but it's also about success stories. Practicing, but it's also about success stories and here I don't mean that somebody transformed and got agile overnight right Every tiny step in the right direction. You know this innovate forward. This is a success story.
Speaker 2:And what we do is when we because what happened? That people came to us. Hey, we did our first Kanban board and now we are doing this and we are doing that, and it's so easy to visualize work and then we put WIP limits and we were, wow. It's amazing, because you need to think that most of people have worked probably in waterfall methods or classical or different. They were different. Right Now, they started something else and this is a success, because this gives others the courage to do that, to realize that it's not so difficult, it can be done, it just any from us can be this change and can create this change. We as community, as an organizer, we are here to help them move this change forward.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, that's the 11 steps, but I understand you actually have a bonus step for free, for free.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. The bonus step is that it's not about me as organizer, right? I am not doing this to show how great I am. I'm not doing this to show how many tools I know, how many methods, I know, how great facilitator I am. It's not about me, it's about the community. We are doing this for the community. We are doing this for people, to let them shine, to let them show their successes and also, sometimes, their failures. We can learn from our failures as well, right? So let them answer each other's questions. Like, if somebody pops up a question in one of these meetings, you don't want to be the first one to answer. You just wait because someone in the community has the answer. You need to start this conversation and continue this conversation. So, no matter how, sometimes and I can give you a quick rule, like 20 seconds rule keep your mouth closed for 20 seconds and someone in the community will definitely come with an answer something better idea than yours, better. You know, this is the bonus. It's not about me, it's about a community, it's for them.
Speaker 1:I want to recap the steps that you've listed here for our listeners on building an agile community of practice that lasts. Have a vision. Don't do it alone. Make sure you get approvals. Once you have approval and a vision and the why, make it public. Check your tools. Have a code of conduct. Make sure you have an organizing team or a leadership team. Get involvement, get feedback. Have a single place of record where you record everything about the meetings, share your success stories and the bonus. It's not about me, it's about the community.
Speaker 2:Wonderful wrap up. Yes, All right. Awesome Well about the community Wonderful wrap up.
Speaker 1:Yes, all right, awesome. Well, alina, this has been fantastic. I know our listeners out there will want to get in touch with you. If they do, what's the best way for them to do that?
Speaker 2:I'm quite active on LinkedIn, so they can find me there. Okay, great.
Speaker 1:We'll put the link to your profile in the show notes and if there's anything else as well, we can talk about that.
Speaker 2:If there's any other links that you want to add, we can add those as well. Alina, it's been an absolute pleasure having you, my friend. I really, really grateful. I have amazing colleagues that I could build this with, and a big thank you to them as well, because this wouldn't have been possible without them, and thank you to you for giving me this opportunity.
Speaker 1:I love your heart, I love your passion. It really comes through, and I believe it did during this episode. All right, everybody that brings an end to another episode of the Agile Within. We so. All right, everybody that brings an end to another episode of the agile within. We'll see you next time. Thanks for joining us for another episode of the agile within. If you haven't already, please join our LinkedIn page to stay in touch. Just search for the agile within and please spread the word with your friends and colleagues Until next time. This has been your host, mark Metz.