Agile HRAn Experience Report

Presented by Doc List, Senior Coach and Trainer for Agile Velocity 2016 HR Summit, Dallas

Nice to meet you!

• Senior Agile Trainer and Enterprise Agile Coach for Agile Velocity

• Photographer

• Love People, Learning

A Brief Explanation of Agile

• Origins in Software Development

• Focused on Short-Cycle Delivery

• Highly Team-centric

• Intensely Collaborative

Background

• Gap, Inc., San Francisco, California

• Training and Planning (2014)

• “We want to streamline our recruiting and hiring process.”

• Three champions: co-head of HR, VP, manager

Value Stream

“Craft the team”Best chance for success - kicked off in March 2015 - four months later

“North Star”The team’s BHAG

Working Agile-ly

Key Characteristics• Collocated - one room

• No barriers

• Open communication

• Focused on a clear goal

• Shared CARGO™

Their Journey

- colocation

- Agile training

- Backlog

- team liftoff

- Continuous improvement

- Agility health

- Skepticism

- Reflect and Retrospect

- WORK

- Agile outside IT

- Scrumban

- Switch tools

- sprint 1

- distributed team

- sprint planning

- user story and

decomposition workshop

- value stream map review

- sprint 0

- “product vision”

- Backlog grooming

- Retrospective

Wk. 12Start

What happens when you mix Human Resources with an Agile Workflow?

...a serious lesson in flexibility

Wk. 1 - 3: Liftoff and Visualize

• “we're the first of our kind: a self-organized, self-directed team - using agile methodology to blow the roof off of traditional HR practices”

• Team Chartering - Team Ocelots

• Where is flow blocked

Wk. 4 - 6: Sprinting To The North Star

• Wk: 4: Product Discover

• Wk. 5: Working as a distributed team, Sprint Planning

• First Sprint!

“What will cut the hiring process time in half and result in better candidates?”

“North Star”: One-Day Hiring

• Background checks

• Coffee chats

• Hiring center

• Focus on delays, not events

Wk. 7 - 9: Continuous Improvement

• Wk. 7: From Scrum to Scrumban

• Wk. 8: What did it feel like to be the first HR team to use Agile?

• Wk. 9: Product Review

Wk. 10 - 12: Customer Is Always First

• Wk. 10: Delivering value to our “customers”

• Wk. 11: Backlog Grooming

• Wk. 12: Retrospect

Evolution

• Sprints (Scrum) vs. Flow (Kanban)

• Flexible roles

• Out of the box thinking and working

Big Thanks To…

• Team Ocelots

• Read more about their Agile journey here: www.HRAgileSolutions.com