Quiz – Mindset and Practices

Going Agile

The CIO announced today that the organization would be starting a project to go agile.

She did not expect that it would majorly impact people’s way of working because, she said, the company would be avoiding the pitfalls of being purist and rather than taking a painting-by-the-numbers approach would instead adapt agile to suit the organization and allow them to adopt a more nimble way of working.

What inferences might you draw from this statement?

Choose Three.

The Stand-up

You dropped in on the Core banking scrum team this morning to observe their daily scrum (a.k.a. daily stand-up). The team has been using scrum for three months now and you were interested to see what was going on. You noticed that a couple of team members were looking at their phones and one of the team did not join the stand-up and kept working from their desk with their back turned.  When it was their turn to give an update they said in an annoyed tone “Yesterday, I did coding changes to the nightly account sweeps. Today I will do coding changes to the nightly accounts sweeps. Blockers: interruptions from stupid meetings” then went back to working while ignoring the rest of the meeting.

The rest of the team said nothing and carried on like it was normal. What does this indicate to you about this team? (Select Two)

ordering of elements

The establishment of mindset and practice in reality occurs on many fronts in parallel during a transformation.

But in terms of the critical importance of the elements supporting each other, what is the ordering going from bottom to top? i.e. the foundation is at the bottom.

Match Descriptions

In the context of Mindset and Practices, match the following descriptions to their terms

Practices

if practices can be defined as ‘how we act ‘ select the elements below that it encompasses.

Select three

Mindset

if Mindset can be defined as ‘how we think’ select the elements below that it encompasses.

Select two

Culture

Identify the two high-level elements that make up ‘culture’ in an organization.

Select two.

Culture eats Strategy

Peter Drucker coined the phrase that ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’.

What did he mean by that? Choose best answer.

Strategy and culture

In relation to strategy and culture, which of the following statements is the most true.

Choose most appropriate answer.

Knowledge Workers

Fill in the missing words

Servant-Leadership

How does the concept of servant leadership differ from the traditional management model?

Choose best answer.

Jen-Son is a Healthcare organization providing care to a base of 2 million people across 12 hospitals with 8 emergency departments, 30,000 staff, 93 operating theaters and 4000 hospital beds.  The IT team is close to 1000 people and support 800 distinct applications across 2600 instances/versions.

Janine is the Lead system analyst on the Acasta project at Jen-Son.

She has a team of three people, plus herself, whose job it is to receive the outputs of the architecture and business analysis functions, and then convert them into system specification and design for input to the 2 scrum teams that are working on the project.  At the last Team Leaders’ meeting Janine had to endure severe criticism from the Lead Architect and the Lead BA, who both complained that their work was not processing as quickly as it should through her team.  The project manager wrote it up as a formal issue for escalation. The only supporter that she had at the meeting was one of the engineering managers who pointed out the the scrum teams were already operating at full capacity and could not easily be augmented.

Later that week an issue response meeting was convened by the PM. In the meeting Janine’s General Manager, who was in attendance to handle some of the flak, suggested that her team could be temporarily augmented by contractors. Her GM pointed out that the project had budget available for this contingency because it had been identified as a risk during project planning, so they might as well utilize it.

What do you think the best response is that Janine could make?

Hierarchy

What elements of traditional hierarchical systems can result in negative effects for systems?

Select all that apply.

Waste and Degradation

In the context of the Theory of Constraints, waste and degraded systems are direct results of what action?

Why is it?

What situation can lead to the outputs of a node being less than its actual capacity?

What is my status?

Imagine a system where successive nodes move work from left to right in the following sequence

Analysis -> Architecture -> Design -> Engineering ->QA -> Deployment

Match the tiles to the status of each node.

The Product Owner

You are working in a scrum team, halfway through a two-week sprint. The product owner (PO) has made a demand that the team take on an additional user story because of something an important person in the business has asked for.  The team has pushed back saying the current sprint goal cannot accommodate it and pointing out that if the requirement is genuinely critical then under the scrum framework the PO can always abort and restart the sprint.

The team then got a visit from the delivery manager (DM), who everyone reports to, who said aborting the sprint was overkill and would not look good. The DM argues that the agile principle of accepting changes in requirement, even late in development, and then instructed the team to ‘squeeze’ the new job in, and ‘don’t be purist, just be agile and make it work’.  The team feels like this is ‘bending’ agile to suit what the DM wants to happen.

What is this an example of? Choose best answer.

The importance of Why

The question of ‘Why’ forms the basis for everything else in Culture.  The reason is because without understanding why, we don’t have buy-in, and we are unable to make well-informed and insightful decisions, that last.

Which ones, of the elements below, relate to ‘Why’.

Select two

Velocity

Match the ways that Mindset and Practice increase  velocity

Attributes

Fill in the blanks using: why, how, what, foundational, and practitioner

Practitioner actions

In the absence of organisational leadership, what options do practitioners have?

Match to definitions

Match the elements of culture to their definitions