Why are we here?

As a new team of Agile Coaches, we are in the process of creating our Vision and Mission, the message we send to the other teams, mostly our clients, on what are we here to do for them. During the discussion, the business need came up, more specifically:  "Our IT team was not delivering, that's why we created this team". I thought about it and although I understand that the delivery problem triggered the need for change and the birth of my team, I think there is more to this.
From my point of view, my team was created because " the IT team was not delivering AND this IT team decided to become Lean/Agile".
Recognising a problem, being strong enough to bring it up and make it visible, is the very first step an organisation can do in order to improve. I say "strong enough" because it takes a lot of guts to admit the problem, to admit that somewhere down the road you have made a wrong choice that right now is proving to create some roadblocks.
Some decide to hide it. If you hide it and you try to patch it, maybe you will be able to fix it without others being aware of this problem, without others knowing that you made a mistake. We are humans, and we are evaluated based on our wins, not our mistakes. I know that someone said "I learned so much from my mistakes that I am thinking to make some new ones". But in business, a long trail of mistakes is not on your side when it comes to choosing the next leader. Because of this fear and this thinking, we can go deeper and deeper in defending the first mistake; we make more mistakes. For how long? Nowadays, usually you can't go on like this for too long. People are educated. They read, they are in touch with business, they are in touch with the latest technology and practises. You can't keep people blind for long. They will either leave you (and you will end up without the required talent to run an organisation) or their commitment level and energy will fall down (as result the productivity falls down). At the end, you haven't fixed your problem, you are elongating the trail of your mistakes and you lost some talent or they are bored.
Some others decide to fix it. As my manager reminds us often "There are different ways to skin a cat". Usually, you do not have the luxury where business/clients come to you everyday with a new "cat" and ask "How will you skin this cat today since I didn't like the way you did it yesterday and the day before? I am willing to continue paying you for experimenting on this." So, what to do?
You need to come up with a strategy, with a framework and with the right support for these.

The strategy will help you focus to where you would like to go, how do you want this problem to be in X months (10% less, 50% more client returns, 30% customer satisfaction, 20% increase on ROI, etc, etc). And then you decide on the framework.

Maybe it makes sense to close the door, sell everything and start something new.

Maybe it makes sense to fire some managers, hire some new ones that are presented to you as "rock stars" and give them X-y months to bring some improvements.

Maybe it makes sense to stop offering one of the products and hammer on the other one that seems to be successful.

Maybe it makes sense to hire contractors all over the place and tie them on short leash with some heavy duty PM.

Maybe.. there are so many maybe-s you can come up with. But you have to pick the framework for you, the one that will make sense to your strategy, the one that you see fitting, the one that you see beneficial for a long term. And frankly, I am glad that in the sea of options out there, my organisation chose to become Lean and not something else (like RUP, or SixSigma or ..). Why am I happy?

Because my organisation is in public sector and as a tax payer in this province, I am happy to know that $$ is not wasted in long processes, old management styles and pre-historic expensive technologies. Because I do believe that agility is the key in today's business. I do believe that long are gone the days where IT can operate in long term plans and put down daily fires without making any change to the ongoing projects. Because I believe that people want to improve their career skill set not just in technology but also in business and management. I believe that it is time to consider everyone in the team as a "partner" and not just someone that will do what manager says and how the manager says.

And that's why my team was created, to support this strategy and this framework. Had this organisation chosen another way to "skin this cat", someone else would be doing something else right now. Someone else would be taking this organisation to a different way of thinking, different processes with different values.
While my team is working on the Lean/Agile framework, we are taking this organisation to new processes, new ways of thinking, new ways of collaborating, new technology and IT craftsmanship. While we are doing all this, day by day, we are creating an environment where the same people that were here 6 months ago, will now start delivering IT projects. My team will NOT deliver these projects, my team will not commit to business requirements, my team will not be executing the projects using new tech tools and issue tracking systems. The people in this IT organisation will do all this, the same people that before, in another framework, could not satisfy the business needs.
So, my team is here "Because this IT organisation wants to start delivering IT projects, and they want to deliver them in an Agile way, using Lean practises"

The steps of Mastering

Reading Lyssa Adkins' "Coaching Agile Teams", I read something that helped me understand what I was trying to explain to myself without success.  And this happened just as Lyssa says: 98% of the times, opening a book at a random page, you might find something that is related with what you are going through or preparing for.
She said: The steps to become master at something are "Follow the rule, Break the rule, Be the rule".

During my martial art classes, I was taught this concept but I didn't really grasp it because I was not competing with my Sensei in becoming a Karate Master.
When I started my new role, I thought I am in between Breaking the rule and Be the rule. But there are two groups that expected from me other things though. One team, the experts hired to kick off and get the ball rolling, expected me to Follow the rule. The teams that I was working with, expected me to Be the rule for them. If you notice, nobody expected me to Break the rule, except myself.
I was struggling with fitting myself into this until I read the steps of mastering at Lyssa's book. It makes sense and I Get It!
Once I understood this, I can position myself better and I know at any point where I am and what others are expecting from me. Once I know their expectation, I run an "intention check" technique and I am not irritated anymore. I just know what they expect. I also  know what I can do.

Breaking the rule doesn't have to be noisy and leave behind a mess to clean. It can be done nicely and on a win-win output!
One lesson learnt!

Break your shell or you will stay small

Your pain is the breaking of the shell
that encloses your understanding.
Khalil Gibran.

I loved this image when I first saw it. I stayed for a good couple of minutes just looking at it. Something inside me found a visual way to express itself. And then the words of Gibran just gave mass to it.

It is really painful to break your shell. You have been in that shell for a while, you are comfy, you know where the cracks are so you don't put too much weight on those areas. And then someone, something, somehow, tells you that this shell's got to go. Crabs, when they loose their shell, they go around to find a bigger shell and make that their new house.
Where will you find a new shell for your naked inner self?

As part of the QMO, we are Kanban-izing a Government company that has been in business for a long time, executing and delivering in a very heavy process way and with a lot of people that have been there since the early days. A lot of the systems, solutions and applications used, are their "babies". They had found a comfortable zone where they knew what was expected from them. The hierarchy was clear, they knew who they had to listen and obey. They were releasing applications, keeping lights on and they could see themselves busy for a long time in that system. Busy for a long time, means feeling secure that this job is mine till I retire and I will get the good pension plan I have been waiting for since I started working here.And then, a new CIO came on board. Unable to understand the workload, unable to justify the expenses, he asked for a better way to run the shop. He asked for that organization to grow. 

And that is when the shell started cracking open. Just like with any growing pain, there was a lot of pain with breaking this shell. Some people were let go and that brought a lot of insecurity to the ones that stayed. A lot of people didn't feel good to see their long time friends dealing with "job hunting", a problem they thought they would never need to face. On the same time, they had to pick up some of the work that was being done by the ones that left. On top of that, a team of contractors was hired to "Change the way things are being done". Without any doubt, the spirits were down.

And that is when a brand new team was created. My team, the QMO. We are all new to that company. We have no ropes to hang on to. We are the ray of light burning the eyes of someone just coming out of a long sleep.We want to make friends and take them on a journey where we know the direction but we can't pave the road for them. The road will be bumpy and curvy.

Just like them, we will grow too. We will move from one shell to another without even understanding when and how these shells were created around us. We will know we are doing a good job when we keep feeling the pain of growth. If we do not feel pain, we have created a shell that's got to be broken.

Today, on a retrospective, a senior developer challenged me with "We have tried before different things like Pair Programming and stuff, but our managers told us not to do it. You want us to be Agile, ok, just tell us what do you want us to do and we will do it!". Off course I couldn't start laying down the roadmap for him in that retrospective meeting. But that told me that even though he was hurt before, even though he is not happy with everything that is going on, he WANTS to do it. He tried before when he didn't have support for this. He will try again, but this time he will be supported.  All this shell cracking noise, is music to my ears!