Agile governance to drive meaningful & lasting change

Innovations in Personalised LearningJuly 29, 2014

Melbourne, Australia

Professor Ken Udas Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic Services) & CIO

University of Southern Queensland

Outline

• Benefits of Agility & Openness

• Agile Governance

• Openness Index

• Values

• Principles

• Objectives

• Examples

• Penn State – Demonstrators

• USQ - Demonstrators

• OER Foundation

• Attributions

Benefits of Agility & Openness

1. Better decisions leading to higher quality products and services, dialogue, and culture

2. Reduced risk

3. Higher levels of community satisfaction

4. Higher levels of trust and moral

5. Increased collaboration and ownership

6. Customized and adaptable team structures

7. More relevant metrics guided by felt need

8. Improved transparency, performance visibility, and project predictability

9. Increased effective project control

Agile Governance Culture Across the Organisation

Agile Practice• Roles• Activities• Tracking & monitoring• Artefacts & documentation• Governance

Openness Index

The Openness Index ties together the notions associated with openness and agility. In many ways, the Index suggests that openness is a precondition for agile practice, and that agility is at least one significant way of leveraging organisational value of open governance and practice.

AgilePractice

Objectives

Principles

Values

Openness Values

Courage: Participating even when doing so results in fear and uncertainty.

Participation: The action of taking part in something (being there). The nature of one’s participation is dictated by its quality.

Honesty: The quality of behaving in a manner that is free of deceit, is truthful, and is sincere.

Reflection (assessment): Engaging in serious thought or consideration about oneself and one’s motivations, behaviors and impacts.

Humility: Practicing honest reflection with the discipline necessary to achieve a clear perspective, and therefore respect, for one's place in context.

Openness PrinciplesCommunication: Sharing information through a variety of means. Transparency is a pre-condition for open communication.

Transparency: Providing access to information in a manner makingit easy to perceive, detect, and understand.

Self-organization: When coordination arises out of the local interactions between individuals and groups of individuals of an initially disordered grouping.

Collaboration: Voluntarily working with each other to accomplish a task and to achieve shared goals.

Evidence-based decision-making: The explicit (and transparent), conscientious, and judicious consideration of the best available evidence and decision making methodology.

Meritocracy: An organisational system or philosophy in which ideas are judged based on their merit, as opposed to a proxy, such as the title of the individual offering the idea.

Openness Objectives

Simplicity: The quality or condition of being plain or uncomplicated in form or design, the habit of which tends to enhance understandability.

Emergence: The creation of outcomes that are irreducible to its constituent parts - that is, it is the creation of something new and more complex than the constituents without a formal externally imposed plan.

Incremental Development: The application of a problem solving approach founded on the principle of direct observation. Theories are proposed, experiments are designed, and actions are taken to test those theories. From the evidence we either reject the theory or confirm it – and we iterate again making incremental progress.

Rapid Feedback: The exchange of information happening in a short time or at a great rate about reactions to an idea, product, performance of a task, etc. which is used as a basis for assessment and improvement.

Continuous Feedback: The exchange of information forming an unbroken whole and without interruption including reactions to an idea, product, performance of a task, etc. which is used as a basis for assessment and improvement.

Demonstrator Projects - Example

Penn State World Campus Demonstrator Projects

The Penn State, World Campus "Demonstrator Projects" focused principally on discovery and exploration. This effort was influenced by a general recognition within the World Campus that our ideas were becoming old and we did not seem to be able to experiment effectively, express creativity, and behave in an innovative manner.

Penn State World Campus Context• World Campus is one of Penn State’s 25 campuses• Responsible for distance education• Delivery partner with academic units• 60+ academic degrees and certificates• 24,000 course enrolments• 40% plus growth rate• Services include registration, academic advising,

learning design, marketing, client development, educational technology, program management, etc.

• Strong traditional “production” orientation

Conditions Impeding Experimentation

• A tradition of top-down hierarchical decision making processes• An emphasis on production efficiency(doing same things better)• A heavy planning process to avoid any disruptions to work flow• A large, resource intensive "task force" project management

approach• Large organizational deployments and cut over for system

migration• Insufficient levels of discovery and experimentation leading to

change, because of the large investment and enforced rigidity made in any change process.

Overall Characteristics we were Trying to Achieve

We wanted the Demonstrators to be developed organically, which meant that they had to be:

1. Low Barrier2. Low Cost3. Low Risk

Methods/Practices

• Each Demonstrator is self-organizing (grassroots, not necessarily affiliated or aligned in any formal way to a strategic plan )

• Each Demonstrator meets specific needs (the owner needed to be able to articulate a need being met)

• Each Demonstrator needed to take no longer than 90 days (keeping the projects manageable - we did not have budget for these other than time and minimal support, so we wanted to make sure that they did not unnecessarily drag out, demonstrators could build on themselves, forced reflection...)

• Each Demonstrator needed to have no significant dependencies (This was to help ensure folks would not get conservative or that unintended costs did not accrue. Of course, if the Demonstrator went beyond its status and was implemented as a more traditional pilot or became production there would likely be dependencies.)

Agile Methods

In practice, the Demonstrator Projects exhibited some agile behavior including:– Participation– Courage– Openness– Evidence-based– Self-organizing groups– Incremental Development– Simplicity– Decentralization

List of Demonstrator Projects (2007 - 2008)

• Accessibility Demonstrator Project• Analytics Demonstrator Project• Building Community Demonstrator Project• Content Input/Output Demonstrator Project• Digital Asset Management System Demonstrator Project• ePortfolio Demonstrator Project• Faculty Advocacy Group for Web2.0 Demonstrator Project• Fluid Framework Demonstrator Project

Continued on next slide

List of Demonstrator Projects (2007 - 2008) cont’d

• Metadata Demonstrator Project• Occasionally Connected Course Demonstrator Project• Using Facebook as an Optional Delivery Platform for A WC

Course• Utilizing Mobile Devices Demonstrator Project• World Campus on Facebook Demonstrator Project

Maturity Model - Reflections/ Lessons Learned

Obstacles• Demonstrator "champions" do not have time to pursue the

idea given current levels of workload• The time resources associated with coordinating and

running the suite of demonstrator projects has not been allocated, so there is a lack of sustained advocacy and leadership

• The demonstrators operate in our "production" environment, and are subject to all of the barriers of "doing business."

Governance• A small group will look through the proposals.• We will do our best to see which project meets the criteria for

being a Demonstrator.• We will contact the Demonstrator sponsors, make comments on

the Intranet, and get definition and try to determine if the proposal can be modified in ways that make sense and frame the project as a Demonstrator.

• We may also ask others to join the review process.• Once "Demonstrators" are identified, we will apply other criteria

to prioritize them and will work with the resource managers who will have to apply resources to the Projects.

You can see that our governance structure:• does not really reflect many elements that are

characteristic of an agile and open organization.• For example, it was not decentralized, open,

transparent, bottom-up, etc.• I believe that we missed an opportunity to really

challenge the organization. We probably needed more time and discipline. Looking back, I would probably have used the World Campus as a site to develop the Openness Index.

USQ - Examples

23-Things: Low-barrier and light-touch Professional development in the use of multi-media and related topics.

Open Scholarly Learning Materials Discovery: Open resource resources discovery to support learning and teaching.

Wiki Harvesting Open Course Design: Demonstrating the ability to author course content in a wiki, and easily harvest and present shared content in a more friendly environment.

OER Foundation - Example

The Open Education Resource (OER) Foundation is an independent, not-for-profit organisation that provides leadership, international networking and support for educators and educational institutions to achieve their objectives through Open Education. The Foundation administers three flagship initiatives;

• WikiEducator - a community of +70,000 educators collaborating on the development of OER for the formal education sector

• OERu - An international innovation partnership comprising over 30 universities, colleges and polytechnics using OER to provide more affordable education, especially for learners excluded from the tertiary education sector with pathways to achieve formal academic credit.

• Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand (national CC affiliate.)

The Foundation subscribes to a model of open philanthropy as a theory of change. The following principles underpin the Foundation’s work:

• Open Source Everything - everything the Foundation creates, funds or supports is open sourced.

• Share, leverage and share again - It's not just the giving, it's also about receiving (leveraging)

• Community as ecosystem - most philanthropy happens in silos. The Foundation has a strategic focus to nurture and promote the development of sustainable and scalable ecosystems. We do this by getting our hands dirty and working in the trenches with a wide range of communities and global networks.

• Radical transparency - everything we do, from strategic planning, to project meetings, to funding proposals are developed openly with free cultural works approved licenses.

• Listen, learn and evolve constantly - this requires constant engagement and open discussion of all we do. We release early and frequently - when we make mistakes, they are small enough to fix. Big scheme planning doesn't work.

The dark side of OpenEvery open community will encounter "trolling" behaviour and activities where individuals engage in the community with the intent to disrupt, harass, and evoke emotional responses. This requires strong leadership filtered by the values of our projects. A few guidelines:

• Don't feed the trolls – experienced open community members will recognise trolling behaviour - best form of defense is not to engage or respond.

• Ensure that there is a transparent public record of all community decisions - in our case, we have a community practice: "If it's not in the wiki, it doesn't exist"

• Have clear rules for engagement – eg when conducting open meetings, use tried and tested procedures like Roberts Rules of Parliamentary procedure and ensure that the chair / facilitator is well versed in these rules of order and acts consistently in accordance with these procedures.

OERu - Agile organisation

The OERu is a large and complex project spanning 5 continents. Community structures have evolved as the needs of the project have matured. (Read: Don't impose structure - let it evolve organically.)

Our structures are needs-based and draw on meritocracy. That is, leadership is earned though demonstrated behaviour and engagement in the community.

In open models, non-performance is transparent and scalability is achieved by "paying it forward" i.e help a newbie gain relevant community experience so that they can pay the favour forward as the project grows.

Free, Libre, & Open Works Project

Hosted by the Open Source Initiative, FLOW is a project designed to build capacity for project managers and educators interested in open cultural works and open governance.

• Charter of the OSI Management Education Working Group (OSI-EDU-WG) 2014-2015: http://osi.xwiki.com/bin/Projects/Charter-OSI-EDU-WG-2014-2015

• The FLOW Syllabus (Version 2.0):http://osi.xwiki.com/bin/Projects/flow-syllabus

Attributions

Openness Index, Pat Masson

https://wiki.jasig.org/display/2398/Openness+Index

IBM, The Rational Edge:http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/mar05/bittner/

Emergence as a Construct: History and Issues, by Jeffrey Goldstein:http://www.anecdote.com.au/papers/EmergenceAsAConsutructIssue1_1_3.pdf

Wayne Mackintosh: OER Foundationhttp://wikieducator.org/OERF:Home

Open Source Initiativehttp://opensource.org/