Lunch & Learn Session / Presentation

Lunch and Learn (L&L) is a great way to collaborate in an informal and relaxing atmosphere, engaging people from different organizational domains and layers.  One of the big advantages of L&L is that people feel more comfortable to interact with on another on par, regardless of their organizational  positioning and relationships (e.g. reporting).   L&L can be also tailored for specific teams, groups, departments or senior management.  L&L, typically conducted by a facilitator (usually, an experienced multi-skilled and impartial to internal dynamics coach-trainer), and can be delivered in the form of a general overview,  targeted/tailored mini-training, preliminary organizational assessment or a comprehensive Q&A.

Below is the list of highly recommended, broad speaking themes that drive a lot of attention and have a proven track record of engaging audiences.  These themes can be delivered in-person or virtually, to groups of different sizes, using various formats.   One of the simplest and most effective formats is lunch & learn.  Please, reach out  directly to discuss options.

  1. Scaling/De-Scaling:
    • General Synopsis:  Fever of scaling has taken over the agile world.  For so many companies, scaling has become the main goal, not means to get to something more important.  Some companies seem to scale just for the sake of scaling, to be in trend and style and on-par with other companies, to maintain their own status quo.   There is a floating belief that the bigger a company is the more it has to scale.  Companies try to scale without ensuring that what they scale is a good thing, like a healthy one-team Scrum. Then, what happens when they are trying to scale a dysfunction? Exactly! They end up with this function, amplified to a higher power. Sometimes, we also see people trying to compare & contrast lean organizational systems/structures, used for scaling agile product development, such as LeSS  and Nexus, with SAFe, while the ladder being a very heavy, monolithic, cumbersome and framework.  This is like comparing apples and oranges and, in reality, is difficult to do.  This is because LeSS and Nexus emerged from the same historical roots – authentic Scrum, and although they have some fundamental differences, they are, at least, comparable. On contrary, SAFe originated from a completely different source and it is much more difficult to compare to the other two.   Topics of scaling usually lead to discussions of organizational design and other important systemic enablers such as HR and budgeting.  Under this overarching theme (presentations can vary in breath and depth), Gene talks about scaling, as means not goals, by emphasizing the importance of organizational de-scaling.
    • Past presentations under this theme:  
  2. Business Agility and Business Resilience
    • General Synopsis: “We’re not Developers so IT agile is not for us.”  ” We also want to be a part of the agile game but we are not a product development team members, and we do not code, so we need something on our own.”  As ironic as may sound, for many people that jumped on the bandwagon of business agility, this is exactly the “what” and the “why”.  It is very important to talk about business agility, is a part of an overall organizational, eco-systemic agility.   The above mentioned anti-patterns are, sometimes, referred to as, fragmented (organizational) agility,  because they lead to us vs. them mentality and relationships between business people, technology people, operational people, and many other organizational structures within the same company.  Under this overarching theme (presentations can vary in breath and depth), Gene will reset understanding of agility, by explaining and justifying business agility, as the key driver for organizational improvements but not answer “thing in its own” that is antagonistic to other organizational structures that also need to be agile (R&D, IT, Operations, HR, budgeting).  Gene will also warn about  most commonly known anti-patterns that exist in the industry, as well as we’ll explain a few ” must have” systemic conditions for success.  Finally Gene will connect business agility and business resilience, with the latter being an organizational characteristic/quality that can help withstand adverse market conditions, shifts and trends, as well as competition with other companies.  
    • Past presentations under this theme:  
  3. Productization:
    • General Synopsis:  In order to properly shift from being a legacy project/program/portfolio-oriented organization to product-oriented organization, and be able to effectively define product(s), your company needs to be prepared to challenge some of its own, historically “untouchable” elements, such as: overall organizational design and reporting structure, teams structure and staffing models, compensation and incentives, and of course, very importantly, funding/budgeting mechanisms.  In this session, Gene will share some ideas about what steps should be taken to properly define a product(s) and organically move towards true business agility and becoming a product-centric organization.  Then will also bring the light some most commonly seen patterns of productization gone-wild-saga, with companies paying too little attention to properly defining products, while relabeling traditional components, applications and bodies of work into, so-called, “products”, instead. 
    • Past presentations under this theme: 
  4. MMM (metrics, measurements, maturities): “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts”.  This quote belongs to either Albert Einstein or William Bruce Cameron.  Irrespectively, we often see that many organizations are trying to collect every possible metric and judge themselves and their employees based on what’s collected.  Some of these metrics are actually pretty useful and could be used to monitor steady states or gradual improvements.  However there are also many types of metrics that are referred to as “vanity metrics” – measurements that are either trivial, or situationally irrelevant, or sometimes even harmful.  Some metrics could be used for relative maturity measurements.  However, a lot of care should be exercised while doing it, because  this could lead to numbers-fudging and system-gaming.  Inappropriate use of metrics could also lead to bad behaviors, leading to antagonism and internal rivalry.  One of the classic examples of how metrics could cause more harm than good is having them mapped to monetary perks and incentives, in situations where the latter should not exist at all, or should be related to team, not individual performance.  Under this overarching theme, Gene we’ll talk about some classically known anti-patterns, when metrics are misused, and situations/examples, when good metrics are applied, in simple (Scrum) and complex (LeSS organizational design system) organizational settings.
  5. HR: Roles & Responsibilities:

 

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