What is Agile?
Explore agile and its relevance in business today with Narinder Dhaliwal. Scroll down to watch the video and discover practical advice and real-world examples.
Introduction
‘What is Agile?’ explores the meaning of agile and how it fits into the wider business context. The session highlights the importance of adaptability and agility in modern organisations. Narinder Dhaliwal discusses challenges such as rapid change, disruption, and global competition. The webinar explains how agile methods help address these challenges. It also explores why some teams find agile adoption difficult and offers practical suggestions for improvement.
Video
Access the presentation here, tune in to the audio version, or read the full transcript.
About the speaker
Narinder Dhaliwal is recognised for her project and programme management expertise. She is the senior product architect for the PRINCE2 portfolio. Her background includes over 20 years as a trainer and consultant for various organisations. Narinder has played a key role in developing industry standards, including PRINCE2 Agile. She brings practical advice to organisations looking to improve their project delivery.
Transcript
You can read the full transcript below.
00:00:00 Narinder Dhaliwal : Hi there, everyone, so my name is Narinder. As you can see on the screen, I am the Senior PRINCE2 Product Architect here at PeopleCert. And basically, I look after all of the products which prove them with a team of people here at PeopleCert, making sure that they’re fit for purpose for the project, programme, portfolio, project office, portfolio office, people of the future. And so, I’ve been asked to come to talk about Agile, topic that’s very close to my heart. One of the reasons being is we’ve just recently launched our new version 2, PRINCE2 Agile book. So, this is a hot topic for us because we know that a lot of industry people talk about Agile, but what do they know about it? So, I thought we’d go straight into our first poll and sometimes things to share the poll with you guys. And the question is very simply, What is agile? And you’ve got some options there, So, I’ll let you pick.
00:01:11 Narinder Dhaliwal : Interesting.
00:01:17 Narinder Dhaliwal : OK.
00:01:20 Narinder Dhaliwal : Well, there’s a bit of an even spread across some of these.
00:01:32 Narinder Dhaliwal : I like it.
00:01:35 Narinder Dhaliwal : So, I’ll wait until it’s confirmed that the poll has ended.
00:01:42 Narinder Dhaliwal : Wonderful. OK.
00:01:44 Narinder Dhaliwal : So, let’s just have a look at this. We had the options of setting strict limitations for time and cost. We also had providing flexibility, embracing change, and allowing for trial and error. Actually, all four of those answers are correct; there wasn’t one right answer there, they were all correct answers. So, it was nice to see that we had an even split, and I’m guessing a lot of you are struggling out. Well, I wanna go for this and I wanna go for this as well. Well, it doesn’t matter, because if you wanted to go for a four, you would be absolutely right to pick them. So, let me talk about Agile in the broader context, it is very much about thinking in a different way. I’ve worked in industry for well over 20 years now, and at least 10 maybe longer, and of those years, I’ve heard this buzzword Agile, I remember when it first came out, and I was very intrigued by what does it mean? Because when we talk about agility to me it means flexibility, if you do yoga it’s about becoming agile. You wanna be flexible, but it is much more than that. It is a mindset, and the mindset is very much about focusing on being adaptable.
00:03:00 Narinder Dhaliwal : Be able to collaborate with more than yourself, so it’s not about me, myself and, I. It’s about working with teams of people, and it’s used a lot to help find ways of improving doing things better. When we also talk about Agile, we talk about valuing flexibility, allowing our teams to adjust rather than follow strict plans, and that’s really important. If I’m working with a team of people, what I don’t want to do is make it so rigid to the environment within which they work that they’re not able to adapt and try things out. We want to create an environment of trust and psychological safety. I have to have the right mindset to do that. So that the team can try things out. I don’t want to just be following a plan; I want them to try things out that might actually be a better way of doing things or a better way of producing something. It’s about working iteratively, so doing things in small segments with small improvements, so that we can get the feedback. The sooner I can show you something and you can test it out, the sooner you can tell me what you think of it. And the sooner I know what you think of it, the sooner I can make the changes that are necessary.
00:04:18 Narinder Dhaliwal : This leads me on to a customer-first approach. In agile when you work in an agile environment, whether you’re using it within your project environment or whether you’re using it within your operational environment. The most important part of this is bringing the customer on the journey with you. Without getting feedback from the people that are going to make use of this thing, we cannot be sure that we’re going to give them something that’s fit for purpose. So, the sooner I can give them something, the sooner we can look at the value that they’re gaining from it. And we can continuously evolve that and improve that. The other thing that we talked about in the world of agile is that we need to allow our teams to self-organise in order to do that, we need to promote autonomy and empower the teams to make decisions and try things out. Now that sounds really good and well, but if you come from an environment where it’s very command and control, that can be quite tricky to do.
00:05:18 Narinder Dhaliwal : And I was guilty of this many years ago, where I am a bit of a control freak, in fact. And I’m very much a control freak, and I often found myself saying. Don’t worry, I’ll just do it because I didn’t have that trust in my team, and that’s not their fault, that’s down to me. I needed to change my mindset, I needed to allow the team to use the skills that they have, they’re there for a reason. I need to let go of things and let them do it. So, we’ve got to create this environment where we protect the teams from outside noise and allow them to do what they need to do, empower them to do that, and give them that autonomy. Within that rules, we also talk about continuous learning and that can only happen if we’re taking time out to look at what did we just do. If we continually doing all of the time and we’re not taking time out along that journey, it’s impossible for anyone to take a minute and think about. What could we have done differently?
00:06:16 Narinder Dhaliwal : So, we talked about retrospectives. Retrospectives are an opportunity to look back at in retrospect. How does that go? Gather the feedback, and again, you’re only going to get the right feedback if you’ve created this environment of trust and psychological safety. So, the team can feedback, but we don’t think this works really well for this reason. OK, so how are we going to fix that in the next iteration? So, when you hear the term Agile, think of it as a term that is used to describe all of these things in red, and it will thrive, it will really flourish if you are creating an environment that allows for experimentation for people to be able to adapt and to innovate. So, let’s build on that. How do we embrace adaptability and agility? We need to be very clear about what we’re focusing on here. When I work on projects and I talk to people about my past and it was very much a hierarchical organisation, and it was very much about this is the thing that we’re going to deliver and that’s it. Once that decision’s taken, that is what we’re delivering, and we’re not changing it because that’s what’s been the greatest possible business case. Since Agile come along, it’s got me to ask questions very differently. You’re telling me you want this thing, but now I need to understand. What is it you need to be able to do with it?
00:07:47 Narinder Dhaliwal : What are you looking to gain from this? So, it’s about understanding not just your outputs, but what outcome is the end user is looking to gain and what benefits is it going to give them? And that will lead you to value. What is it they value the most? Your organisation might be saying “save money”. As an end user, I don’t care about that, I want something that’s just going to save me some time in the day, maybe 5 minutes, take 5 minutes off my day, which allows me to catch up with other things. So, what do I value more than others? It’s also about dividing your work into smaller segments or stages, so break the work down and iterate. Don’t try and do all of it in one go. Now, in order to do that, you’ve got to build in the opportunity to design something, build something, test it, get that feedback loop going so that we can then make it better; we call that iterative and incremental, use tolerances for empowerment. So, as I said, if you’re one of those people like I used to be like. Where you’re like or, this is a very rigid environment, I need to know about everything, you’re never gonna get anything done. People are just gonna keep harassing you, and I know when I’ve delivered training in the past, I often ask the question. How many of you have asked someone to do something, and then when you got it back, it wasn’t what you were expecting?
00:09:13 Narinder Dhaliwal : And nine out of 10 times, everybody puts their hand up. But then I flipped the question, and I say, well, how many of you have been asked to do something? And as you’ve walked away, you’re kind of asking yourself the question, did I really understand what I’ve just been asked to do here? But the environment wasn’t a safe environment to question, so you’ve gone away. You think you’ve understood what’s been asked to be done. You do it, and then you hand it back, and you find out that wasn’t what was expected. So, we really need to create clearer tolerances, clearer boundaries, and communication is really, really important than that. You know, people need to understand when they are allowed to digress and try something out versus when something really does need to be signed off because it’s too big a change, and that comes through empowerment. Now, when we talk about Agile, we talk about fixing time and fixing costs. This is one of the reasons why industry loves it because they deliver on time and to budget. But the only way they’re able to do that is because we make the scope flexible. Now often people say to me, Naz, you know by the way, you can call me Naz. Now, if I make scope flexible, am I not compromising on quality? And the answer is no, absolutely not.
00:10:29 Narinder Dhaliwal : I’m going to give you an example of this, so if I said to you that the project is about delivering a refurbished office, and it’s got to have space for 50 people to sit down and work at a desk. I’ve set a boundary around that, so now I then might say if I can fit in an extra 10, great, so I’d like it for 60 but no less than 50. What I’ve done there is given you a scope tolerance. Now, whether I give you 50 or whether I give you 60, the quality of what I deliver is not to be compromised. So, I would set the quality criteria, the specification for the tables, for the chairs, for the PC’s, and that has to be met whether it’s 50 of them or 60 of them. So, scope is not linked to quality in that way, do not feel that if I give you less of something that I’ve given you less of the quality, the quality should still be brilliant of what I do give you. Building on that, we also talk about facilitating learning from experience. So, one of the beautiful things about Agile is that it’s really important that we build an opportunities to learn, and we can only do that when we talk to people. We give them the opportunity to try something so that we then listen to what their feedback is.
00:11:55 Narinder Dhaliwal : And I’m sure that all of you have experienced this. If somebody comes to you with a picture of something, you’re able to have a conversation about that picture, and you can give your feedback. And the example I often use is if any of you that have ever been out to buy a new kitchen or get your bedroom furniture fitted, you go to the likes of any specialist company that sells those products, they normally create you a 3D image. What they’re doing is showing you an early replica of what you can expect to see. The reason they’re doing that is so that you can think back and you can say, well, I don’t like that there can you move that from here to there? What we’re doing is we’re building in that communication element. And we’re allowing people to give their feedback early so that when I do finally deliver, I give them something fit for purpose and that needs to learn from experience because at each opportunity, we should be looking at, could we have done things any differently? What have we learned from that? Is there a better way of doing this? And then we talked about providing guidance for tailoring. So any of you that are familiar with the suite of PRINCE2 products that are out there, we’ve got project management, programme management, portfolio management and so many others and we always talk about tailoring and often people say to me Naz you know when you say tailored, does that mean I don’t have to do this, and I’m like no. Isn’t what it means; it means that you do more or less of something based on the environment that you’re in. So, if I buy exactly the same dress, I don’t know dress or trousers from a store. The tailoring aspect is the size that I pick up.
00:13:32 Narinder Dhaliwal : The product is exactly the same, it looks the same, it’s the size of it that’s going to be different for me to somebody else, that’s 10. This is why we say use a method that is going to allow for all of the above, in order for you to really feel confident that you’re applying agility properly, so let’s build on that. Let’s talk about some of the challenges that you’re often going to face. So, I have another poll here for you, and the poll is; what is the biggest challenge that you face? So, let’s see what you come back with.
00:14:33 Narinder Dhaliwal : Interesting.
00:14:38 Narinder Dhaliwal : OK, so we have a clear winner of lack of mindset at this stage. Ohh now we’ve got it on part with reluctant to adopt Agile. These are all common challenges, by the way, that I’ve actually seen in industry, hence if I pick them. OK, so lack of agile mindset, we’re actually going to look at all four of these within my slide set because all of them have something to them. So, rapid change in the environment, new technologies and trends reluctant to adopt our agile and lack of agile mindset. These are all areas that we focus on. And I’m going to start off with some of the sort of common ones that you’ll hear. So, from a business perspective, constant rapid change in the environment, we as organisations are having to more and more keep up to date with what’s going on outside because technology has moved on so much that there are so much change happening out there. We have to keep trying to stay ahead of the curve, and sometimes just being at the curve is the most that we can do. We can’t even get ahead of it and that leads into global competition as well. You know, we have a lot of competitors out there, whether we like it or not. There’s a lot of people in the same space that we might be in. And what we don’t want to do is get left behind, we have to tackle that competition by looking at, well, what its it they’re doing that, we should also be doing? and vice versa. Disruption caused by new market entrants, economic downturns, we know that you know we can take COVID as an example now that it’s done and dusted, but it’s taught us a lot. It’s taught us that we can deal with uncertain environments and things that are happening.
00:16:26 Narinder Dhaliwal : And whether it’s going to have a long-term effect on the economy, we’ve learned to adapt to that. And when we know that when government changes, things change in the world, there’s a war somewhere, we’re all impacted by it, and we have to adapt to that. And then of course, you’ve got your emerging technologies and trends, let’s take AI as a classic example of it. You know, AI is here and it’s saying I’m here to stay now, deal with me, and I don’t know of any organisation that is burying their head in the sand saying, well, it’s not gonna affect us, because they realise it is. It’s here, people are using it, and we need to get on board and figure out how we’re going to bring that into our organisations. This is where Agile can really help address some of these challenges because it allows you to incorporate that flexibility. Trying things out, creating that safe environment, doing the experiment, allowing people to try something new, building in the opportunity for feedback, you know, finding out what people think of something before I invest all of my time and money in giving them this new technology. And that can in itself be a challenge where projects want to do that but find it hard to do that. And of course, you’ve then got both sceptical users, people hear the term and sort of going. No, not for me. I’m all about you know structure, controlling governments, and Agile just sounds very not any of those things.
00:17:53 Narinder Dhaliwal : So, I wanted to address these with you. So, constant rapid change in the environment. So, some of the challenges that you’ll often hear people talk about is reactive planning. Yeah, we’re not being proactive, we’re reacting situations. There’s a lot of frequent rework that has to take place. So, we end up going back around and replanning things and doing more work. We often see people talk about difficulty aligning their project outcomes with how the business is now, shifting its priorities, and that can be a real challenge when you’re dealing with constant change on the outside. And then you’ve got stress levels increase due to the constant need for adaptability and quick decision-making. How do we address this using Agile? The way to address the challenges with agile is by getting your professionals to be skilled enough to deal with unpredictable situations. And one of the ways to do that is by allowing them to understand how agile actually works, agile ways of working is what I’m going to call it because there’s so many different ways of being Agile, so having a toolbox that allows them to pick this is agile way of working. I really think would help with this situation. Helping them to adapt to that environment, and then they help the teams adapt, bringing people together to allow them to collaborate.
00:19:22 Narinder Dhaliwal : And to maintain governance and control whilst they do it, this is a real big misconception in the marketplace where people think you can’t use, for example, PRINCE2 Project Management because it’s about governments and control. Well, you can’t use agile in that because agile that flexibility. Well yes, you can, because no one doesn’t say an agile that you shouldn’t have governments and control what it says is you need to empower your teams, but set clear boundaries. We often then talk about global competition, so a lot of organisations in today’s world do work on a global basis, so they’ve got increased pressure to deliver their projects on time, also within budget, but then also with a higher level of quality. It’s like what everybody wants, not gold-plated, they want the real gold bar. And that’s tricky to manage, and often we’re having to do this while managing our cross-functional and sometimes even cross-cultural teams and stakeholders. You know my background work with DHR, I worked with many people around the world in different parts of DHR, and it is different culturally, there’s different ways of doing things, and that could be quite tricky. So, you’re not only having to manage these relationships with people across the world, but you’re also trying to keep up with the demands of the organisation.
00:20:44 Narinder Dhaliwal : And that could be quite a challenge, and another challenge is limited resource. You know, we don’t have enough of the resource that’s necessary. We’re having to squeeze every last bit out within those tighter margins, and that’s becoming the normal way of doing things, which again, from a staff perspective, from a people perspective, is very stressful. So again, how does agile really address these challenges? Well, professionals need a global mindset; we cannot afford to just work in a mindset of, well, this is how we do it in the UK, and that’s it. It’s our way or no way, we need to be culturally aware, and we need to have the ability to create competitive advantage. You know, it is good for an organisation to be able to show that they have that global understanding. If you’re not aware of how things are done in other parts of the world, but yet you want to enter that markets, not gonna help them for you. Because you’re not knowledgeable, you haven’t taken the time to get to know that market and what their cultural norms are. Agile helps teams to agree on goals and stay flexible at all of those levels, and that includes from the people at the top, the leaders, all the way down to people on the ground that are doing the delivery work.
00:22:04 Narinder Dhaliwal : So, we need to make sure that we building opportunities for people that are for the way down to the bottom to have the same understanding and to apply agile ways of working so that we can pivot. So again, try something help, ask the right questions. And do a pilot project, you know, we’ve never worked in this industry sector before with this particular country before, let’s try it out. But do it in agile ways that you can learn quickly, what you don’t want to do in is invest lots of time and money in an initiative that at the end, doesn’t give you the benefits or the value that you were hoping for. So, take an agile approach to it, break it down into smaller pieces, trying little things out, especially to learn that is the beauty of working in agile way. The sooner I deliver something of value, whether it’s a picture, as I said earlier, or a physical product, the sooner I can learn. Then we’ve got disruption. So, these sudden shifts that are caused by new market entrants, economic downturns, or innovative business models that force professionals to quickly pivot strategies and recalibrate their project objectives. This often leads to reactive rather than proactive management.
00:23:19 Narinder Dhaliwal : And this is tricky, we live in a world that is constantly changing. These things happening in the environment, in the economy, that are constantly requiring us to rethink things, and what happens is you’re at the project level. So, you’re absorbed within the project, your organisation is therefore trying to firefight what’s going on around them, and sometimes there’s this misalignment because they’ve changed direction, but we didn’t know about it because it didn’t filter down to us. So how do we address those challenges? It’s about being able to anticipate. You have to be forward-thinking and then being able to adapt to that disruption, which is going to be vital for your long-term success as an organisation. And I often hear people say. Well, surely that’s a senior management job. I disagree, and the reason I disagree is often it’s the people on the ground that are doing this stuff day-to-day actually, have their ears to the ground and know about all of these new things that are happening out there. Well, what’s going on around the world? So, it is important that we listen to the people on the ground as well as the people at the top. You’re gonna have two different approaches here, two different sets of information we need to look at both.
00:24:38 Narinder Dhaliwal : So, Agile helps teams handle change by working iteratively, so Agile is about introducing change in a controlled way. So, we do that by working iteratively, by reviewing our progress, and some of you may have heard of Lean Startup. The whole point of Lean Startup is an agile way of working by Eric Ries, was to stop people investing all of their money into an initiative that would end up taking all of their savings. And, it you wouldn’t fly, it wouldn’t work. Well, the idea is that we try something out, he’s one that gave us the concept of a minimum viable product. And that MVP was a way of testing the market, trying something out, getting some feedback on it, and then using that as a way of saying, yeah, we’re on the right track or no; we need to pivot; we need to try something completely different. We’ve then got emerging technologies and trends. So again, we live in a world that is fast-paced, very much changing, people are so smart. And I remembered my mum used to say these days kids are born like computers, they’re just so intelligent, I totally agree with that. I met with a whole load of university students only the other day and I was blown away by just how smart these young adults were. I don’t remember being quite that tuned up at the same age as them, but maybe that’s just a generational thing that, I am old anyway. But keeping up with new tools, new technologies, I do think we live in a world where this is more relevant, and it has been for the last 20 years now, to be a bit longer, where technology changes very, very rapidly, somebody comes up with an idea, and there’s something new on the market. And we also talk about methodologies that are in constant challenge. We have to keep up with what’s going on out there. So, professionals need to learn and implement these advancements, such as knowing about AI.
00:26:42 Narinder Dhaliwal : Knowing about Agile, knowing about advanced analytics often whilst they’re still doing their day job in the background, and I remember that’s how it was for me. I was doing the role of project manager, I was running a very large-scale project, and then AI came and hit and people like you need to get up to clip up to speed with it. And I was like well, OK, but it’s very new, very different to what I’m used to, and now I’ve got to carry on doing this and deliver and learn about this, and that can be quite tricky. And we often see that resistance will slow adoption can really hinder efficiency and team performance. You know, people will shy away from trying something out because it doesn’t look comfortable for them. It maybe feels all too new or too much information or too complicated for them. So, they will resist it, so what we need to do is we need to create strong teams and we need to give them the skills of working in an agile way, and can only do that by investing in your people.
00:27:42 Narinder Dhaliwal : And that’s along with openness to new technology. We need to learn to embrace, try things out. And that can really position people, individuals, professionals, as innovators. And we often hear about thinking of the modern man, which skipped my mind. But we talk about the early adopters and the innovators versus the dragging and screaming and kicking right at the end, the bell curve. And when it comes to change, well, we want to be at the front of that; we want people to be able to feel comfortable that this is a good way to go. Let’s try it out and let’s see what it’s all about. And this is where Agile really supports that kind of environment and that mentality because it allows you to experiment, it helps your team stay future-ready. And if they’ve heard of something, it gives them the opportunity to say go and find out more about it. Let’s try it out, let’s see what it’s all about, and it opens up better ways of working. We’ve also got projects where they’re unable to incorporate Agile effectively.
00:28:45 Narinder Dhaliwal : I have seen this a lot, a lot, OK, projects where they say they are using agile in name only. Because when I sat with them and looked at how they’re actually doing things, and they really are not, they’re not very agile at all, it’s a tick box exercise. So, some of the things to look out for here is people are resistant to change. So, teams and stakeholders that struggle with this term flexibility, and agile way of being flexible, they find it uncomfortable. Stakeholder buy-in so this is where your clients and executives actually prefer fixing this scope and saying you will deliver X by this date. They fix the scope, and they don’t understand that actually that’s a bad way of working. Balancing flexibility and structure so agile requires you to be adaptable whilst ensuring accountability and people struggle with that. They don’t see how the two can support each and then integration with non-agile teams, we all know that well, I certainly have experienced this, and I know lots of people that I’ve met have experienced this where you get into an organisation and there’s certain pockets within the organisation teams. That are very good at working in agile ways, they’ve nailed it to a team, and they are comfortable with it. And then you go across to another team, and then we’ve got click, and that can cause some friction.
00:30:14 Narinder Dhaliwal : So how do we address that? Teams need to understand what those challenges are up front, and they need to adopt the right mindset to apply agile. And I want to sit on this point for a little while when we talk about mindset, you’ll hear it and you’ll see this when I talk to you about the new book, and I hope you’ll go and have a look at it. PRINCE2 Agile version 2, we’ve got a whole piece on here about having the right mindset and the importance of it, and we talk about being agile versus doing agile. And our experience and our research showed us that people doing agile at the delivery level have nailed. They’re very good tip, but one of their biggest bug bears that we often hear people say is we are very good at being agile, it is just I wish somebody would tell senior leadership to let us get on with it and allow us to be agile because they’re restricting it. And that’s because they’re not being agile at that top level; being agile is about applying the right mindset, creating an environment that allows for agility thinking in a particular way in an agile way. To say I’m going to allow the teams to do things in this way, I’m going to create an environment that is conducive to that. So that they can really thrive at doing agility.
00:31:34 Narinder Dhaliwal : And that has to be done whilst balancing governments with agility demands, and the only way to do that is to understand that you don’t have to compromise one for the other. It’s understanding, what do we mean by governance? It’s about making decisions at the right point, but until I get to that point of decision-making, creating an environment where agility really flourish. Now, as a senior stakeholder, if I’m not thinking in this way, I might not understand why I’m looking at a prototype. Why haven’t you given me something more substantial to look at? I need to understand that the reason I’ve got a prototype right in front of me is we’re going to use that to do some learning now. So, I don’t carry on wasting your time and money and developing something that’s not fit for purpose. I need to have that understanding, so we talk about the as our mindset, the importance of leadership adopting that so that it can filter through and not affect in a negative way the people that are doing agility at that lower level.
00:32:39 Narinder Dhaliwal : Next, we’ll often have people that are sceptical of structured methods. So, the challenge might be that they perceive a loss of flexibility. So, if we’re talking about using agile in a PRINCE2 Project Management environment, there might be like no chance. Yeah, I don’t want that government in control. I don’t want to work in that chaotic environment that you call agile. It’s about understanding that it doesn’t necessarily have to be like, that’s their perception. Stakeholder conflict, so executives may demand structured reporting, clashing with agile way of working, which is very much more informal. We talk about integration issues, so agile teams might actually struggle to align with structured departments. They’re used to working in a particular way, and then they’ve got to bridge that gap and work with other departments that don’t work in that way. And fear of bureaucracy so added structure may be seeing us slowing things down for them, especially down delivery. And having just gone through this project with the team, with the PeopleCert and the 1300 stakeholders that we worked with, contributors. One of the things that came up time and time again, people very much agreed that there is this need for bridging the gap between the people on the ground that are doing delivery.
00:34:04 Narinder Dhaliwal : And they need to be supported and feel supported by the people that are doing the leadership, and it’s the leadership element that we really wanted to tackle and make sure that they understand the importance of creating that environment. So, to address the challenges with our agile professionals need to balance PRINCE2 government. So, PRINCE2 Project Management governments with agility at all levels whilst using clear reporting and flexible scope. So, we want to have clear reporting, but we don’t want it to be that I need you to put tools down and now create me a report. So, I need that information to make a decision, but how else can I get it if the teams got a team board and they’re updating it as part of their daily stand-ups on a day-to-day basis. I need to get into the mindset of rather me ask them to send me the info, I need to get out and I need to pull the info, it’s there for me. So why am I asking for it to be reported to me when I can easily go and pull the information? And setting clear boundaries will help your team stay empowered and adaptable. There’s nothing worse than a team member not knowing. When do I need to escalate something, and when do I not?
00:35:22 Narinder Dhaliwal : For example, many years ago, when I worked on a particular project, I remember boss saying to me, Why are you asking me so many questions? And I said well because I don’t know whether I’ve got the decision-making and how or not. Well, yeah, you have. Great, OK, now we’ve had that conversation; I’ll crack on with that. Then I have the same boss to say, Why was I notified of this? I thought you said that I had the decision-making power, and I can crack on with it. And now you’re telling me why weren’t you notified? Like we need to create some clear boundaries here. I need to understand, when do I need to come to you? And when do I not? And that’s my tolerance and manage my exception is so important. So, let’s talk about our third pole. The question I’m asking you is, what would you gain by using a structured method? This is that you personally, Do you think it’s going to provide you with controlling governments? Do you think you would personally gain it would provide you with a consistent approach? Would it facilitate your knowledge sharing and reuse of assets, or would it allow for trial and error? What do you think you’d gain?
00:36:41 Narinder Dhaliwal : Interesting.
00:36:48 Narinder Dhaliwal : OK. This is looking good, I’ll give it another 30 seconds.
00:37:00 Narinder Dhaliwal : OK.
00:37:06 Narinder Dhaliwal : Now you’ll notice I said structured method. OK, because whenever we talk about methodologies, be it project management, programme management, or ways of working agile. They’re in a structured environment, we have to have structural control. Government and control is important, and I think, you know, I can’t say enough to people if it was your money, it was your company, you would want that structure and control. Otherwise, how are you going to be able to sleep at. So, we cannot do away with that. What we need to do is create the environment where we still have that, but people can thrive. So based on these results the most popular answer was providing a consistent approach, and I’m glad that you guys have picked that’s important. My second favourite was provides control and governance, we then had facilitate sharing of knowledge and free use and then last we had allows for trial and error.
00:38:05 Narinder Dhaliwal : Interesting results. OK.
00:38:08 Narinder Dhaliwal : There was no right or wrong here by the way, it’s just an insight for me. Let’s talk about based on what you’ve said here, let’s talk about what some of the trends in the market are. Now there was a study done a little while back, where we pulled the information together to look at, you know, what is it that the industry is telling us? So, we know that the global working environment is very much impacted by all of these things on the left-hand side. And you’ll notice agile methods in project management was one of the key factors, but the findings found that “97% of organisations still believe project, programme and portfolio management is critical to business performance and organisational success”. Well, that’s what that is telling me, my interpretation of that is 97% of organisation is saying we need structure and control, we need clear processes, we need guidance. We want to be consistent in the way that we deliver things. The only reason they want to do that is if they’re seeing positive results. In terms of Project Management, it is in high demand; you’ll notice that by the year 2030, there’s going to be a need for 2.3 million new project management employees.
00:39:29 Narinder Dhaliwal : So, this could be not just as a project manager, but within that field needed by that time, that’s lot’s of people, OK, 50% of professionals are going to be project managers, but do not actually have a qualification, they fell into it. You know, that’s how my career started, I fell into Project Management, and then I was made to do the PRINCE2 Project Management qualification back in 1997/1998, some time. 32% of the budget is lost when a project fails to reach its goal, that’s scary, that’s a lot of money to lose because we failed to reach our goal. Now I want you to think about Agile now. Could agile have helped us? And I reckon we could have done. If we use agile ways of working, we could have experimented, tried things out, got feedback, and realised we’re not doing right direction. And then the last one there, 39% of projects failed due to change in an organisation’s priorities. And this tells me they’re not adaptable, they are changing their priorities, which they need to organisations need to change priorities based on what’s going on around them. But the way we do things internally isn’t allowing us to adapt quickly enough to meet those new priorities. And again, if you adopt agile ways of working, it’s gonna help you be able to do that.
00:40:59 Narinder Dhaliwal : It makes you more future-ready, more ready for the unpredictable, allows you to pivot when necessary. So, that was all about agile and the challenges and how you could overcome them. I now wanted to talk to you very briefly about us as PeopleCert and what we do and what we what we’re coming out with now. So, this is our new proposed qualification scheme. So those of you that are familiar with PRINCE2, you’ll know that it used to be PRINCE2, and people thought of project management immediately. It’s now more of a banner across the top; it’s our branding, and everything has the prefix of PRINCE2. And underneath it we then have Agile, we have Project Management, we have Programme Management, Portfolio Management, Risk Manager, and PMO manager. This is where we’re going, this is the future. You see, the reason we’re doing that is we want to be very clear about our offerings, and I’m going to talk to you about the agile element under this offering. So, PRINCE2 Agile, this is what the book looks like, and it’s now the new version 2, and the new version 2 came out in May. I have the absolute pleasure of being involved as a co-author along with multitude of people. So, the lead author is Ruth Robert, and then Ruth Lopez even should get the name right. And I was supported by my colleague Simon here at PeopleCert between three of us. And then we had a whole host of co-authors and contributors, there was over 1300 contributors, just to be clear. So, this was an agile project in itself, the production of this book and all of the material that goes with it.
00:42:44 Narinder Dhaliwal : And I thought I’d share with you some of the feedback that we received on our journey on this project that use agile ways of working whilst using PRINCE2 Project Management as its overall structure. And it looks quite small, but these slides are going to be made available to you, I believe, afterwards but these are just some of the things that people have to say that got the opportunity to be part of what we classed as our beta testing and passed of the journey with us. Now, the other thing I’ll say here is that when we were producing this product, and I’m going to call it a product, it’s a physical thing, and we consciously wanted to try out our own method. We wanted to practise what we preach, essentially. And one of the things that came away from this is that very early on when we did our alpha sessions. We tested our thinking, what we had as a vision, we tested it on a small group of people, and we got their feedback and that was agile in its essence, starting up. We use that feedback to then iterate, and if I have my colleagues Simon here, he’d tell you the number of iterations we went through was incredible. We had over 16,000 lines of line-item detail feedback along the way, that we went through every single item; every piece of feedback was crucial to us.
00:44:09 Narinder Dhaliwal : And I wanted to share that with you because we are talking about agile, and in order for your project to deliver something that’s fit for purpose that meets the value of the end users, because that’s who it’s for, they have to come on the journey with you, and that’s exactly what we did here. We brought them on the journey with us, and this is just some of the quotes from some of the people. That have the option to be with us and we’re very grateful to them because without them we wouldn’t have this product. Lastly, from me before I hand back to Sevcan, we’ve got what’s next. So visit our website so its peoplecert.org and when you get this in PDF form, you should be able to click on the link and it is on the next slide as well, but also on the website, you’re going to find that we have a section called PeopleCert membership. The membership area is a really great area, if you haven’t joined it, I recommend it. It’s where you can keep your CPD points up to date. So those of you that have done a qualification but don’t wanna reset the exam in the future, this is another way around that that you joined the membership platform. And then you get access to blogs and templates, and I say templates, actual templates that you can use; there’s lots of articles on there. We’re forever publishing articles from experts tackling, you know, issues that we know are relevant in the current world. And it’s got a wealth of information so definitely worth having a look. Hopefully that’s been of use to you, and at this point, I’m going to hand back to Sevcan, and she’s going to talk to you about the next couple of slides. Let me know when you want me to change the slide for you?
00:45:51 Sevcan Yasa : Yeah. Thank you, Narinder, that was very insightful indeed, and I hope everyone actually learned something. Just very quickly, if you do have any questions, please do pop them in the chat. This is a reminder that the webinar is recorded, and you will receive the link next week alongside the slides. So, these are our contact information for Knowledge Train, and agileKRC, and PeopleCert. You can contact us about PRINCE2 Agile or Agile courses, and then Narinder, can you go on to next slide?
00:46:28 Narinder Dhaliwal : Absolutely.
00:46:32 Sevcan Yasa : And then these are Knowledge Train and agileKRC courses. So fearful to have a browse, you can contact me as well, I’m just going to quickly pop my e-mail. If you have any questions, please e-mail me, and then just before we head over to the Q&A, I’m just going to quickly pop a feedback form. I do appreciate your feedback, positive or negative; it’s always useful. Just give us an idea of what you guys want in the future as well. So, if anyone has any questions, please do pop down in the chat, let’s be a few minutes for everyone.
00:47:42 Sevcan Yasa : Certainly, seems like feedback is positive.
00:48:16 Sevcan Yasa : We do have a comment from Andrew, look at options away from PMI.
00:48:26 Narinder Dhaliwal : Yeah, very valid point. We can definitely take that away, and if you want to give me a bit more around that clarity around that question, I can definitely try and answer it but if you’re making a general statement, yeah.
00:48:54 Narinder Dhaliwal : Thank you. Please do feel free to ask me any questions that you have. Just use that chat facility and I’ll try to get through as many as possible because we still have 10 minutes, so I’d be happy to.
00:49:15 Sevcan Yasa : So, we have a question. So how can we gain a support leadership buying and support for scaling agile and introducing structured agile approach across the whole organisation?
00:49:28 Narinder Dhaliwal : So, thank you, Simon, for asking that question, and there is a whole section in the book around this, but you know that already, around gaining support. So, we talk about scaling agile within the book and the importance of leadership understanding that, so this could be through a change programme of some kind, it could be through transformational change. There’s many different ways of trying to understand this, and I think what I normally say to an organisation is first of all, try and understand what you’re trying to achieve here. Maybe you need to try a pilot project out where you say I want to introduce agility. I want to do it everywhere. Well, don’t try and do it everywhere all in one go, because that’s not gonna work, maybe test it out in a small area first before you roll out across the rest of the organisation. Because that gives you an opportunity to look at what we’ve gained from that, where the changes need to happen. What we need to improve so trying it out on a small group of people. So, remember that when we’re talking about scaling, we’re talking about moving from one team to multiple teams, and that can be quite tricky. So, we say try it out first on a small set, then use the learnings from that and take it forward.
00:50:53 Sevcan Yasa : Thank you, Narinder. I hope that answers your question. Does anyone have any more questions?
00:51:04 Narinder Dhaliwal : Seems like everybody’s quiet today, it’s not even Friday.
00:51:09 Narinder Dhaliwal : I can see there’s a question being typed.
00:51:32 Narinder Dhaliwal : Absolutely, Carmen, little steps according to the maturity of your organisation, couldn’t agree more, and organisational change management is a thing, right. We need to be very mindful of how we introduce change and what we’re trying to achieve from it. So that’s part of your transformational change plan. You know, think about how you’re going to do it, plan it. Don’t just go into it and yes, start off small and growth steady is one of the favourite terms that I like to use quite often.
00:52:10 Narinder Dhaliwal : So, you asked how to select the agile approach. This is a great question, and it’s a very tricky one because certain industry sectors and certain organisations do have a preferred way of working. So, when we talk about agile from my sort of background and from within the people that we talk about it on a more generic level, we say that look, there’s many different ways of working agile. Some people like scrums, some people like lean, some people like Kanban. There’s no right or wrong. OK? The idea here is to try and do things in a more agile way and look at what is going to work for your type of environment. Hence, when it’s all planned, you can’t just jump into it. You need to think about what your end your end goal is. How are you going to implement this? How many teams are going to be impacted? And then sort of plan that, and then give it a go. So, all of this is given to you as guidance within the PRINCE2 Agile book. So definitely try and get your hands on that. Kindly ask the question, will there be a webinar with insights of the new PRINCE2 Agile, was me kind of giving you some insights. I don’t know of any future webinars that we’ll be focusing on that, but I know that within Knowledge Train, they have attended all of the briefings, they know very much, everything there is to know, they’ve been on the beta testing journey with us. So, they’ll be able to definitely provide you with any answers that you need, so please do reach out to them, and if you’ve got questions, and they’ll be able to answer them for you.
00:53:58 Sevcan Yasa : Yeah, definitely. If there is anything specific that you are looking for. You can always e-mail me or let me know the chat, and I can always e-mail back. Or if you obviously want general information on the new PRINCE2 Agile, that’s perfectly fine as well.
00:54:36 Narinder Dhaliwal : Any other questions?
00:54:39 Sevcan Yasa : You people are typing.
00:54:47 Sevcan Yasa : OK, that’s absolutely fine. I will email you with the details.
00:55:05 Sevcan Yasa : No problem.
00:55:26 Sevcan Yasa : Yeah, I’ve got one more minute. If anyone does have any questions.
00:55:42 Narinder Dhaliwal : So, I’m going to very quickly say something about the former version and the current version, just to give you a some insight and then I won’t say anymore very, very quickly the previous version, version 1 was very much only for projects, so using agile in the project environment the biggest difference with version 2 not only has everything been updated, it’s complete rewrite, but it’s no longer for just Project Management either. It is Agile in its entirety, so you can use it within projects as well as beyond projects. And it does have a section on AI in there as well.
00:56:20 Narinder Dhaliwal : A pleasure, Ingrid.
00:56:27 Sevcan Yasa : It doesn’t seem like there’s any more questions, just one person typing.
00:56:51 Narinder Dhaliwal : I would like to say thank you to all the people that attended. Thank you for taking the time to come and listen to me. Hopefully, it was informative.
00:57:02 Sevcan Yasa : Thank you, everyone. I think it’s safe to say that we can end the webinar. Thank you everyone who participated. Thank you so much, Narinder, it was useful and insightful, especially examples. So, I appreciate your time and everyone else’s time. So, thank you everyone, and hope you have a nice evening.
00:57:26 Narinder Dhaliwal : Thank you.
00:57:27 Sevcan Yasa : Thank you, everyone. Bye.