Leadership Insights with Paul Armstrong
This week, our very own Paul Armstrong was interviewed by ‘The Technology Insider’ with Aaron Wright to discuss leadership, industry trends and what the future might hold. See the article below:
Welcome to Manager Insights!
In this series, I talk with industry leaders, start-up founders and technology experts to bring you the latest insights and challenges facing the tech industry.
This week I caught up with Paul Armstrong. Paul started his career as a web developer, before moving into the world of agile software development, working for well-established organizations such as Toyota, Sky and William Hill. Paul now runs his own agile consultancy, Gemba Group, which focuses on helping organizations navigate the complex landscape of digital transformations and software delivery.
Paul and Gemba Group aim to avoid the typical transformation by playbook and distance consulting models instead favoring to be “at the gemba”, leading from the front and playing a pivotal role in the do, measure learn, adapt process of transformation and delivery.
First up Paul, a topic on everyone’s minds. What impact do you think AI will have on your work this year?
Despite the continued hype, investment and innovations of AI, I don’t think they’re going to impact the overall environment of business agility or how great software is built. It could add value immediately as a day-to-day tool that helps us to create better code and technology platforms; from automatically generated tests, creating consistent, elegant and hygienic code, analysing and improving deployment pipelines, self-documentation, the santisation and custodianship of big data platforms; not to to mention everyone’s favorite task; report generation.
I believe AIs most immediate impact will be to generally make complex business systems manageable and usable as well as improving the efficiency of peers.
If I really let my mind wander I could envisage a world where AI is integrated into all business systems providing it with the context required to contribute to knowledge-work such as suggesting innovations in the discovery or creative processes such as design thinking.
What is one challenge you expect businesses to face over the next year?
The obvious two that immediately spring to mind are the economy and people. The global economy and the way people work have (and still are) going through the biggest transformation of all. As we saw in the midst of the pandemic businesses tend to take a defensive / risk averse posture but the pressure of falling behind competitors, missed opportunities, not delivering on plans and general stagnation builds up a crescendo of panic and reactivity, so while defensive posturing may be the right thing to do, perhaps it doesn’t need to go to the extremes we saw during the pandemic.
At these times it’s even more important for leaders to be clear in their visions and goals, to ensure software teams are working on the most impactful and highest priority items and that we’re testing hypotheses early to reduce risk and ultimately wasted expenditure.
How might organizations overcome these issues?
As I alluded to in the last question, it doesn’t matter how efficiently you build the wrong thing.
There’s a famous, and slightly tired quote from Peter Drucker that still resonates with me:
“There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.”
So if releasing software that costs time, money and sanity is the most useless then pushing that risk to the beginning of the value stream makes total sense and there are some practical frameworks and techniques to help with this. Here’s a few to get the ball rolling:
- Design Thinking: Understanding your customers from the extremes to the typical, understand why the love, hate what you offer, find out about how they use your software, gain a deep understanding of the problems they face and consequences of need solving them, pool from a bunch of different minds to come up with innovations, refine and test them in as lo-fi a way as to prove or disprove your hypothesis.
- MVP: Instead of developing from a requirements document established months or years ago to find out that market conditions, user needs and technology have moved on (if it was ever understood in the first place), why not release a small but usable piece of software and then prioritise the next item to be built from the feedback proving the viability of your product in the marketplace, starting to build hype and possibly even monetisation and bring users along for the journey; it doesn’t even need to coded.
- Rigorous prioritisation: The most prevalent prioritisation method in companies today is to fast-lane initiatives from the stakeholder that shouts the loudest. If ever there was a way to ensure failure, this is it. It’s important that product teams have a clear, transparent and challengeable prioritisation method centered around maximising value delivery that goes beyond the bidding war scenarios resulting from completely dreamed up estimations of how much an initiative will bring the company.
- De-centralised decision making: I think we all know we need a degree of autonomy to be happy at work, and it pays companies to grant decision-making authority to those on the shop floor with the best and most up-to-date knowledge of a given situation. Not only will it produce quicker, better decisions that improves motivation but it also means that leaders can focus on what they’re good at, whether that be securing business, projecting a vision, helping teams align and creating meaning.
- Hypothesis driven development: It doesn’t matter how successful you have been, or how experienced you are, ultimately the things we put out in the marketplace are a guess and should be treated as such. As we spoke about earlier when discussing risk mitigation, this mentality of treating backlog items as hypotheses that we need to prove or disprove is crucial to avoid wasting money, time, motivation and positive user perception.
What do you think makes a good leader?
As a leader I think you have to live by your word, your principles and get in the trenches with everyone else; for the good, the bad and especially the ugly. Too many times do leaders expect to impose transformation on people without being willing to evolve themselves and recognise they’re a key part of any transformative process.
The creation of psychological safety and creating an environment which allows for failure is an incredibly important aspect to creating any high performing team; afterall we learn more from failure than success and it has a compounding effect on the value delivered down the line. If we create a culture that validates or invalidates ideas quickly and efficiently delivers on the most promising innovations then this is the most cost-effective and motivating of environments for development teams.
Lastly, personal development is a crucial element for me. It’s a false economy to avoid investing in people for fear of them leaving. I want to work with the best people that enjoy what they do and are serious about accomplishing their goals. That’s why I encourage team members to seek opportunities to evolve outside of the typical cut and thrust of what’s written in the job description. One example that immediately comes to mind was a request from a new, but very capable graduate to the team about some ideas for a company all-hands featuring the most senior people at the company, not only were his ideas great but he also wanted to represent our team at this session. This is something that was agreed to and I will always remember his reaction that we allowed him to do that. Not only did he represent us very well, he gained exposure to senior figures within the company, but perhaps most importantly it helps to build trust and show that we were willing to bet on him.
And finally, a topic of contention across LinkedIn. Can a remote team build a good working culture?
There are obvious downsides to remote working and distributed teams, but the positives for individuals, teams and companies far outweigh the negatives. Firstly, let me just say that remote first working becoming default and normative for those in software development was always inevitable; the pandemic merely catalyzed the process.
Many people want point to the obvious like those meetings requiring the asynchronous communication of large groups of people such as big room planning, company reviews or meetings requiring more creative collaboration, but as I’ve adopted better tools such as video conferencing platforms that can split people into different groups, or tools like miro where people collaborate creatively together, my remote facilitation skills have improved and people have generally become more comfortable with remote meetings there is little to no difference in the outcome.
I’d argue that just as people saw the pandemic as temporary they also viewed remote working as temporary, whereas I’ve mentioned it was an inevitability, and instead of looking at how to work better remotely and adopt better tools, we viewed it as a holding pattern until the office doors opened once more.
Companies should embrace remote working and look to companies like GitHub who have always been distributed for inspiration and to understand how to do it better rather than simply waiting to return to the status quo.
Final words:
I’d like to thank Paul for taking part in this series of Leadership Insights, where we explore current industry challenges to help technology leaders to make better decisions. If you’d like to find out more about this weeks guest, you can do so below:
About Gemba Group
Gemba Group is a leading boutique software consultancy specialising in agile transformation and software delivery. They help clients manifest change and apply the stratagems required to disrupt their marketplace and thrive as modern agile organisations. Please visit their website if you’d like to find out more about Paul and his work: https://www.gembagroup.co.uk or contact them at hello@gembagroup.co.uk.
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