Delivery Risk is Found in Your Teams

In my QValue Portfolio Scoring model, the way we develop the risk model is to focus on our teams. The reason we do that is that teams manifest risk in your organization and if you look at their delivery cadence sprint over sprint you can assess the risk of delivery by quantifying the team’s predictability.

Predictability often becomes a weaponized performance metric, but this is not at all what you should be doing. First, you need to understand that a team’s predictability is a manifestation of the inefficiencies of the organization in general. For example, if there is an inefficiency in the flow of work to teams due to a lack of strategic direction and roadmap, this will manifest itself in team delivery cadence as they jump from one top priority to another.

Risk in the QValue model looks specifically at the cost the risk may entail. We don’t directly look at risk from a delivery date perspective as we are focused on delivering small strategically aligned outcomes that are associated with an expected return which is then compared to the expected cost of acquiring that value. Unpredictable teams, through no fault of their own, have a higher risk of their estimates (and cost) being larger and taking longer to deliver.

Moving to an investment mindset for our technology portfolio we need to assess our expected return relative to the risk to that return from a cost perspective. At some point in time cost may exceed the return. The QValue model provides the framework to make informed decisions on whether to continue investing or move to something else.

If you want to understand where to invest in organizational/process improvements, look no further than the impediments your teams face, from lack of strategic direction, siloed management decision-making, and lack of clear objectives to high levels of technical debt or lack of automation. Your teams are the guiding light showing you where to make organizational process improvements that will support the smooth delivery of valuable technology solutions.

Defining and Aligning Value

Just because we think something has value, does not necessarily mean it is valuable.

Often our perception of what has value is driven by a personal bias, such as that t-shirt from college you just can’t throw away. That t-shirt delivers value in the form of memories, however, you can’t derive anything valuable from the t-shirt outside of your memories.

There is a difference between perceived value and delivered value.

Value cannot be realized unless it can be quantified in some way.

This may sound like a semantic exercise but I think the distinction is an important one that needs to be made as it drives how we fund software development projects.

When organizations go through their annual planning cycles, they ask their functional leaders to come up with software projects that they want to do.

In this context, leaders may often turn to what they perceive will provide value, however, the value they perceive may not deliver the value the organization requires from a strategic standpoint and it often is not quantifiable.

This happens when the organization is not aligned with a shared understanding of the strategic outcomes that will deliver real value to the company.

There is often an inherent imbalance in many organizations, where you have one part of the organization working to eliminate some technology or functionality that another part is actively seeking to implement. These are real cases I’ve seen as a coach.

The way to deliver valuable outcomes (ROI) to the organization is to align your work to your strategies.

My valuation model takes your strategies and converts them into value factors that are applied across your entire software development Portfolio.

Using a portfolio investment approach we then define the organization's risk/return profile which will ensure that we are focused on investing in work that is both foundational as well as aspirational.

If you don’t have bala­nce you will never reach your aspirational goals as your foundation can’t support it.

Software development is an expensive endeavor with annual investment running between 5%-10% of total revenue or more for most organizations.

Not knowing that your investment is delivering real value makes that cost go even higher.

Why you need to have an Investment Mindset to Manage Your Product Development Intake

If your organization is like most, you have an annual planning process where your functional leaders come up with things they think are important to do and then provide a cost estimate to your PMO, ­then you are not having the right conversation in your planning process, nor are you making an informed decision as to whether these disparate projects have strategic value.

In the worst-case scenario, you have two different groups working on opposing efforts or they may both be working on the same capability, meaning you have doubled your cost for the same capability (at a minimum).

By focusing only on cost, you are missing the key aspect of your investment in your software and product capabilities that support and drive your organization. 

To ensure that you are building real long-term value you need to develop a value-based investment mindset that incorporates expected value (outcomes), cost, and risk associated with an anticipated investment.

My valuation model translates your organizational strategies into value scores that are associated with quantifiable outcomes.

When an idea is submitted, it is accompanied by a lean business case and a value score.  The value score defines the outcomes at the outset of any planning.

It allows for healthy conversation in the Intake stage as to whether or not the idea should even be considered, value score aside.

You have limited investment dollars for your software/product development and you cannot waste them on work that is not valuable or aligned to strategic outcomes. 

In truth, your software is filled with features and capabilities that are rarely or ever used.  Keeping people busy working on things that have no value is not any fun from a technology perspective and it fills your code base with significant tech debt since many of these unneeded features were part of a project plan associated with unrealistic dates. 

Moving to an investment mindset also gets you thinking about the flow of work to teams over the project and date-driven work that is already decided upfront.  Developing a consistent flow of work for your teams is one of the single most important steps you take to develop mature agility.

Additionally, by taking an investment approach you allow for investments to be stopped, just as you might drop a stock from your portfolio if it isn’t performing to your risk/return profile. 

You would do well to adopt the investment maxim that I was taught, have a sell trigger as soon as a stock price drops below a certain threshold, meaning don’t hold onto bad investments to the point they have no value.

What this means from an agility perspective, is that you have the power to stop investing in an idea if you discover that the cost or the efficacy of the idea won’t deliver the value you had expected.  In your waterfall project approach, you would be forced to continue the project even if you had realized it wasn’t going to deliver what was expected.

If you would like to learn more about my Portfolio Valuation Model connect with me at michael@soundagle.

Transparency, Accountability, and Predictability - A Trust-based approach to Adopting Agility

These are the three pillars that I believe are the foundation to creating a successful Agile organization.  So much so that I’ve created an approach called TAP2 Change.

Each pillar supports the other and without developing all three pillars your ability to become an Agile organization will have only marginal success.

But what do we mean by ‘becoming Agile?

The Agile Manifesto was expressly about improving how we developed software, and though it highlights the need for high levels of business and technology engagement, it has a gaping hole in it that has left it hobbled and unable to realize the full benefit of being Agile, which is that the entire organization must change to support the Manifesto.

Being Agile is a state when your organization no longer thinks or acts in the previous way that you work, rather Agile is your new state of operations.  Unfortunately, Agile has been sold as a silver bullet, a product that will solve ALL of your organizations' problems and all you have to do is bring in a cadre of coaches and viola! your organization is Agile.

In any organization, we are always looking for better ways of working, Agile is just a new ‘better’ way of potentially working.  Just like your waterfall days, you will always be attempting to make Agile better.

But what is interesting is that virtually all organizations that grew up with Waterfall have their entire organization optimized to run in Waterfall.  Yet Agile has stayed almost entirely within the domain of Technology. 

You are asking for your organization to deliver more quickly, yet you don’t optimize your organization to support that.  As you start your Agile journey, you must consider the organization holistically, which is what TAP2 Change does.

This is why Agility requires you to build three pillars - Transparency, Accountability, and Predictability. 

These pillars have nothing to do with the frameworks that have grown up to ‘operationalize’ Agile, they can support the pillars if that is your choice, but they are not the entirety of what Agile must be if you are to have long-lasting transformative success.

TAP2 Change is designed to provide you with guidance, not directives, on how you can approach becoming Agile.  At every organization I’ve been at, we talk about how we are different from other organizations, and you are entirely correct and to think there is a single framework that will work as-is is not being realistic.

As a coach, I have had much success in helping organizations become more Agile, yet each one had its unique aspects that required that I tailor what we did to accomplish Agility.  And what worked at one organization may not work in another, being flexible in how you define Agility is the key to success. 

Again it’s not about the frameworks, at best they provide you a veneer or window dressing of ‘doing agile (note the small a) if Agile is a mindset then right now our mindsets are centered around Scrum, SAFe, LeSS, DAD, the list goes on. 

Though I will be writing in more depth on what each Pillar is all about at a high level here are the three pillars you need to develop as part of becoming Agile:

• Transparency –

  • This starts at the top, with leadership providing a clear understanding to people why becoming an Agile organization is important, what are the threats to us if we don’t become Agile, what are some of the expected changes that need to happen to support Agile (both organizationally and personally).

  • Conveying how can everyone in the organization both participate and also succeed in this new operational paradigm is another transparent layer of successful Agility.

  • Creating a clear Agility Mission and Vision and making it transparent will create the north start for everyone as they begin to ask the important question, how can I contribute to our collective success.

• Accountability –

  • Here is where we start to see the real aspects of the operational side of Agile.  And again it starts at the top.  Leadership can’t what I call a ‘fund it and forget it’ approach to this adoption, they too must change how they lead, manage and think about their organization. 

  • As a leader you are accountable for the success of Agility, you can’t outsource change to outside consultants (we can help but we aren’t the real change agents despite what everyone may think).

  • Planning and delivery comprise a large part of Accountability, which touches every part of the organization and top to bottom.  You can’t be Agile if the only thing that changes is that you deliver your waterfall projects in 2-3 week sprints.  Your organization must change everything from Ideation, Intake, Planning, Funding, Operations, and Staffing to support organizational Agility. Absolutely nothing is untouched by Agility if you are doing this right.

  • Empowering people at the lowest levels of the organization leads to high levels of accountability, building trust is the single most important part of the accountability pillar.

• Predictability –

  • This is the most controversial pillar of the three because Agilists see predictability as a means to continue to have projects that are fixed scope and time.  Yes, this happens in many Agile organizations, this is not what I mean by being predictable.

  • It is important that we not ignore every organization's need to deliver predictable results, whether they are a public or private entity.  Leaders are the public face of our organization and when they provide feedback or guidance on how or where the organization is going, investors and customers alike, are listening.

  • Predictability is the final pillar of TAP2 Change and the real focus of this is to optimize our Product Development teams to deliver consistently,  What this means operationally is that in an Agile organization there are no fixed scope/date projects.  Rather there is a Product Roadmap that provides visibility into small incremental improvements to that which we are working on, be it a brand new product or an existing one. 

  • Leadership with a high level of engagement can see progress (transparency) and know that their teams are being accountable (accountability) for delivering incremental value consistently (predictability).

One of the most important aspects of Agile is that it changes your entire organization, whether you want it to or not, eventually, the pain of living in the multiverse of Waterfall and Agile, will become too painful.  You will more than likely in this scenario go back to Waterfall, as the path of least resistance.

Because Agile is an organizational change, you must build trust with everyone involved.  And you must provide transparency to everyone in your organization regarding what, why, and how Agile will change their work.  Without this, you will not be able to convince people to change and Belief Perseverance (which we often mislabel as resistance) will be what keeps you from achieving your goal of moving you to Agile.

Why Do We Need to Scale Agile?

That is a question I have been grappling with over the past few weeks because even though I’m an Enterprise Agile Coach, who is typically brought in to support scaling Agile, usually via SAFe, I struggle with the whole concept.

Scaling Agile on its surface sounds anti-Agile as it implies a level of structure and conformity that will kill creativity, which is what Agile is really about.

However, ever since Agile had success in small settings, there has been a rush to sell Agile to large organizations as the cure to solve all of their issues.

Scaling frameworks sprung up to support this desire to move to Agile and with it came everything that will kill real Agility.

Here’s the thing, those initial successes you had were with small teams, working on things that could be isolated from the rest of the organization, and were provided a space to try new ways of working, without the pressure to conform operationally to a fixed date and scope project.

That was my experience, working in a completely Waterfall world I became the Scrum Master for a team that was going to build an entirely new product. We were very successful and in about six months we had a market-ready product. Though everyone was impressed that was the end of the organization’s experiment with Agile but was the beginning of my journey towards it.

It was many more years before I worked at an organization that needed to change everything about how they worked and it was the first time I had a view of what the needs of a larger organization might be related to working in Agile.

Though we were provided space to work differently and to make mistakes, we also as a group kept ourselves informed as to what other teams were doing and if something was working we’d look into whether that made sense to adopt.

We become more structured in how we worked through months of trial and error, while engaging our leadership to gauge what they needed so that we moved towards a common goal and outcome.

Though we worked in projects (note the Agile Manifesto has the word project in it so it’s not something that goes away) we helped our business and PMO partners understand that by moving to Agile we were providing them much greater transparency as to how we were progressing and more importantly it gave the business a greater understanding of the complexity of the work we did on their behalf.

Over the next 18 months, we went from a poorly performing development group to one that had gained the trust of the business and was given ever-larger initiatives to work on, ones that transformed an entire organization.

The key thing you need to understand with Agile at scale is that the primary thing you are trying to do is to unleash the creativity of your people. You hire tons of very smart people and then turn around and tell them exactly how they have to work, we don’t like that.

The problem with this? Your organization isn’t typically set up to support this and the scaling frameworks don’t even address people and creativity as important elements of Aglie.

By unleashing creativity you are allowing your people to figure out best how to work as a team, across the organization, and deliver increasing amounts of productivity, quality, and value.

I believe what has been the focus of scaling Agile is to provide Sr. Leadership an allusion that Agile is a thing we implement, like Salesforce, and then turn on. If everyone follows the same processes, attends the same ceremonies, and acts in the same manner, then the entire organization must be Agile, right?

If you are on an Agile journey already or are thinking about starting one, don’t start with a scaling framework first. If you need one later, consider it.

Instead, start by changing your organization structure so that it supports letting people who do the work figure out best how to do the work. What is required from Leadership is to establish guidance focused on:

o How the organization makes decisions — What is our mindset for them? We’ll align our decision-making around those expectations, ensuring we are all on the same page.

o How the organization decides what is valuable — This one is the hardest, look to your strategies first. By providing understanding to both what is value and how we can derive it, your teams will make good decisions on what work will bring the best value in the moment.

o How we will empower you — Allow failure to be part of the journey. No framework will expunge the need for failure, what frameworks do is focus on activity over outcomes more often than not. Celebrate failure for the learning it provides.

As you consider Agility in the organization know that there are foundational aspects of your operations that must change, from HR, Finance, Sales, Marketing, and Technology, everyone must be engaged in the journey, it’s not just a technology thing. This is what scaling is about, allowing people to make the necessary changes to enable Agility, not laying a rule-based structure over another rule-based structure, and hoping things will get better.

Implications of Self-Empowered Teams

We talk of teams being empowered, but in reality, most teams never reach any level of real empowerment because their focus is on activities over outcomes.

Activities that support the frameworks we implement in the name of Agile become the focus of our day-to-day life. The activity of building and having a backlog of ‘work’ is a metric we typically convey back to leadership on the ‘health’ of a team. So their focus is on creating a deep backlog instead of having a backlog that is filled with strategically aligned outcomes that deliver value.

If a team is truly empowered then they would know how their decisions of what to work align to outcomes that the organization seeks.

Unfortunately, in most organizations, the transparency and alignment of strategy to value is not well known or may not exist at all.

Empowerment is not just Leadership saying, you are empowered, it’s instead about laying a foundation of transparency about what they believe is the most important outcomes that teams can deliver and then providing them the runway to do that through experimentation and empiricism.

A truly empowered organization won’t look anything like the frameworks say it should, because empowerment implies a higher level of independence than the frameworks provide.

With great independence comes great responsibility for everyone involved in ‘Being Agile’.

Empowerment must build trust through the ability to show how you delivered value and that value then being positively leveraged by the organization to sustain and support growth.

Organizational Zones of Antagonism

Recently my family and I were watching a worldwide bio-diversity seminar online and during one of the segments on Lichen’s (yes it was fascinating) the presenter talked about how Lichens grow and they formed what she called Zones of Antagonism as they looked for more food which allowed them to grow bigger.

The Zone of Antagonism formed a barrier around their space and would ward off any encroachment from another competing Lichen organism for their food source.

This concept immediately got me thinking about how organizations often operate with zones of antagonism as well.  We see and deal with them all of the time though we often refer to it as the politics of an organization.

People, due to the siloed design of their organizations' processes, often form what might look like zones of antagonism around their functional area.  These manifest themselves in many ways but are often revealed when an organization goes through any type of change management, such as an Agile Transformation.

Change forms a threat to the status quo, to the power bases built up with the current structure of the organization.  Power influences outcomes and outcomes drive behaviors.  Tell me how someone is incented and we can tell you how you are likely to behave.

We reward success, but which also means that there is a loser.  Much like the Lichen looking to compete for food, people often look to influence or consolidate power as much as they can when working within an organization.  We have been taught that to move up in an organization implies high levels of authority, influence, and compensation, so these are the drivers for what we see when we pull on the levers of change.

What we as change agents might refer to as resistance might also be called zones of antagonism instead.  It’s not that people are resisting as much as they are protecting against either something they know to be a real threat to their current state or something they fear due to a high level of unknowns.

As an Agile coach, we need to put ourselves in the place of the individuals we are coaching and ask if the organization has made clear the vision of why Agile is the way to go and what the organization and the people within it will get out of supporting the move to it?

If leadership for an organization has not made clear the game plan for engaging in change, Agile or otherwise, then people, much like Lichen will respond by establishing their zones of antagonism as a way to delay, thwart or even kill the transformation overall. 

We know resistance to change is real, however before condemning the resistance seek to understand it first.  It’s this step that starts the real work to remove the zones of antagonism in an organization that will cause the value you seek.

Too often as coaches, we are transactionally hired to come in and teach Scrum, SAFe, or any of the other myriad of frameworks used to ‘implement’ Agile. 

The problem is that the frameworks won’t make you Agile, only the mindset of change combined with the vehicle (frameworks) can move you from simply going through the motions and ‘Doing Agile’ to the place we want to be of ‘Being Agile’, where operate in a new normal.

TAP2 Change - Building an Agile Organization via the Pillars of Transparency, Accountability and Predictability

I’ve been involved with Agile for almost 15 years in all manner of roles and organizations. Some of the Agile efforts I’ve been involved with could be counted as a success, some not so much. 

The organizations that I’ve been involved with, which had successful transformations, had a few key behaviors they exhibited, which included:

1.     A willingness to be vulnerable regarding what wasn’t right about how the organization. These organizations weren't afraid to discuss what wasn't working and make decisions about what needed to be done at the Leadership level.

2.     Active engagement from the organization’s leadership and a willingness to experiment and fail along the way towards mature and effective agile processes.

3.     An ability to provide people and teams the space to become self-organizing and empowered to define how best to work within in the context of being Agile.

As I've moved through the Agile experience I've identified a way to approach an 'Agile Transformation' from a different perspective. Too often our focus is only on the frameworks that have grown up to support the implementation of Agile, such as Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, xP and a myriad of others. These frameworks focus on how teams operate and are concerned mostly about the flow of work to teams. This is only part of the equation.

Based upon my experiences I've created a framework that is holistically focused on changing the entire organization not just the software development capability.

I call the approach TAP2 Change

TAP2 Change focuses on developing three key pillars necessary for a successful Agile transformation:

1.     Transparency

2.     Accountability

3.     Predictability

Transparency –

This pillar is about defining many of the missing pieces of most Agile Transformations, most importantly identifying why the organization wants to move too Agile.

Agile shines a light on all of your organization’s inefficiencies and asks one simple question – What you are going to do about it? 

Something we don’t tell organizations trying to be Agile is that Agile doesn’t fix anything, it’s not a framework, or a process, so it can't 'deliver' anything for you. What it is, is a mindset which asks you to challenge your current belief structures held within your organization and then start the process of re-envisioning your organization.

Transparency starts at the top where we challenge Leadership to:

1.     Define a clear vision and strategy conveying to the organization why you want to do this and what you expect to have as an outcome as you transition to Agile. Tell people the important part of change - ‘What’s In It For Me’

2.     Reassess how they view their value streams or develop them if they don’t exist. This will challenge long-held beliefs about what is valuable to the organization and will result in a brand new way of thinking about your business.

3.     Redefine your products and capabilities within the context of your value streams. This again will challenge beliefs about where your organizational value resides. 

4.     Engage people from all levels of the organization as you build out your Agile Transformation strategy, ivory tower approaches need not apply. Agile is a ground game that needs input from everyone in the organization so it doesn’t appear that this is being something done to them but with them.

5.     Completely change the way you look at how you finance your software development projects, moving from Project to Team-based funding.

Your Transparency Pillar will be the most difficult and will take the most time because if you can’t be transparent about what outcomes you are seeking and the ways that your organization must change to get them, then you will not realize the full value of going Agile.

Instead, you’ll be like the myriad of organizations who reach the state of Doing Agile and never move past this state or worse regress when leadership declares they are Agile and stops supporting it.

Accountability –

Accountability is an important element in any Agile Transformation however much of our efforts in rolling out Agile to the organization avoid organizational and team accountability.

When we talk about Accountability we are talking about several elements:

1.     Organizational Accountability – Leadership is accountable for defining an Agile Transformation strategy and roadmap and ensuring that they both communicate and regularly update the organization on how they are doing. Leadership is also accountable for ensuring that they support the change and don’t simply fund the initiative and forget about their part in this significant culture change that they must lead.

2.     Team Accountability – As Product Development teams begin operating in whatever framework that they will be using, they are accountable to the organization to engage positively and seek to continually grow in the maturity and capability of that framework. Too often Leadership views Agile as a way for software development teams to not be accountable for their work and show progress in delivering on important features and functionality. This is not the case, but how we view accountability is not about hitting fixed dates and scope but rather being accountable with respect to our Transparency so that Leadership is informed with facts about how we are progressing and can then more clearly understand the issues with attempting to create features in a highly complex environment.

Leadership is accountable to teams to be engaged in assessing what value we they are delivering and making fact based decisions on what is needed not what was wanted.

Predictability –

Predictability is ultimately what Leaders are looking for, they have to make commitments to customers and shareholders with respect to value that they expect to deliver. Not all organizations have the luxury to continually develop and deliver new features and enhancements such as Amazon or Google can, the reasons are many but they are real.

This pillar however, just as with the Accountability Pillar, is not about a team marching towards a fixed date/fixed scope effort. Rather Predictability is about understanding the capacity of individual teams and the entire organization and identifying the minimal amount of work that will deliver the most value in the shortest time.

We view Predictability not within the context of scope but with cadence, be it story points, # of stories, or whatever metric you use to identify how much work can be completed within a specified amount of time.

To ignore our need to show progress, even if the progress shows that we are hitting challenges, provides important fast feedback to Leadership so that they can make informed decisions and manage expectations of customers earlier than waterfall would ever allow.

You can build out one or more of the Pillars, but it is the strength of all three that will provide you with a strong foundation for building a successful Agile Transformation.

To learn more about our process you can reach me at michael@soundagile.com or go to www.soundagile.com

Also - Coming Soon - Look for my book - TAP2 Change Building an Agile Organization via the Pillars of Transparency, Accountability, and Predictability.