Agile and Change require Consequences

A few years ago, I was brought in to be an agile leadership coach and during my time there I was responsible for coaching the Director of Architecture who after meeting me a few times, looked at me and said, ‘as long as I’m sitting in this chair and in this office, you won’t be allowed to do any of the agile things you are talking about.  We work the way I say we work, so you can cancel our remaining 1:1’s as we aren’t going to be doing anything agile while I’m here. ‘ 

I thought to myself, well at least I know where I stand.

I then went to the VP and relayed my conversations with the Director of Architecture and was not really surprised by his feedback.  He told me that she was the most important person on his team, and he relied on her to lead architecture over almost everything else. He said she was old school, but they go back many years together and frankly he trusted her more than he could trust me or the agile approaches I was suggesting as he didn’t have any experience working in agile.  And worse, he wasn’t willing to support some experiments in visualizing some wins that would help move behavior toward a new normal.

It was during this engagement that I developed what I call the three pillars of organizational change:

Transparency, Accountability, and Predictability. 

The transparency pillar is almost entirely focused on leadership and if you can’t get this pillar right no amount of focus on the other two, which are supported by the frameworks will result in real change.

We talk about the failures of agile, they are however often a result of having no consequences for not adopting agile.  That organization is still thriving in its industry, could it be doing better, delivering more value?  More than likely, but at the end of the day unless there are consequences for lack of change, no change will happen and no amount of coaching can change that.

Real change starts with establishing the transparent reasons the organization needs to move towards agile.  Explain the reasons, the challenges, and the outcomes to everyone.  Only after you have defined why you need the organization to become more ‘agile’ and the outcomes that everyone will track towards, will the organization have the support of everyone and real long-term change will happen.  These outcomes will be a key OKR for your leadership, which will support real change and this must be supported by agile coaches who have been leaders themselves.  Unfortunately, most coaches in the industry today do not have any real-world experience in development, organizational change, or leadership.  A certificate does not convey any underlying experience.

Agile transformations are sold as a waterfall project, and after 12-18 months your organization will miraculously become agile by implementing ‘x’ framework.  You won’t, organizational change is harder and long-term in nature.  If you are in the midst of trying to become more agile or just now thinking about it, talk to me.  My Soundagile Learning journey is a way for your organization to own and manage your move toward business agility.  Check out the learning journey here - Learning Journey — SoundAgile Consulting

Moving towards agility is an evolutionary step that must take into account how your organization works today.  Your business has been in a continuous state of evolution from its inception, to think that agile can be implemented any other way is just kidding ourselves.

Agility Isn’t Found in a Framework

The Agile Manifesto is now at the 20-year mark, and I remember back in the very early, those of us working in it took everything we learned and applied it to how our organization worked and, in those situations, our ‘agile’ was customized to our organizational needs. We weren’t focused on any framework and the scaling we need happened within the context of the organization and work we did.

It wasn’t long after the beginning however that Agile Frameworks, some of which were designed by the Manifesto creators, started to take over. And in the ensuing years the promise of Agile has become the pain of Agile.

Now we are mainly left with an environment where we have Hatfield vs McCoys fights about which framework is right, who is doing it wrong, etc… which takes away from what business really needs — solutions to the challenges and problems that face them.

Agile frameworks have in many ways become the problem not a solution. Leadership doesn’t look to frameworks to solve the problems that face them, yet what they really seek is agility, not Agile.

What I’ve learned over the many years is that though frameworks provide some level of foundation for agility, they are still mainly focused on optimizing technology work and.

What you need as an organization is to develop three fundamental agility capability pillars:

Transparency, Accountability, and Predictability

1. Transparency — Must be pervasive throughout the organization. It involves:

a. Transparent Intent — The organization must be transparent in their strategic intent, expected outcomes and their people empowerment.

b. Transparent Empowerment — Establishing the guidelines, outcomes and expectations that will be part of empowerment is a proactive step towards real empowerment.

c. Transparent Strategies, Objectives and Outcomes — Without this key component, the people in your organization won’t understand intent nor will they feel empowered to pursue any outcomes without someone directing them first.

d. Transparent Planning — Everyone in the organization should understand how value is derived so that they all focus on defining the most valuable work that delivers long-term value.

2. Accountability — Must be embedded in the culture, fear of failure must be removed and replaced with learning and empathy.

a. Accountable Leadership — Leaders can’t define large projects and then place the responsibility of delivering onto people who haven’t had the opportunity to understand the intent, goals and objectives.

b. Accountable Goals — Must be quantifiable and defined collaboratively. We create dissonance when organizational goals are siloed, often pitting one functional group against another.

3. Predictability — High performing organizations and teams thrive on developing a consistent cadence of delivery, not towards a fixed date and scope project, but towards a goals and outcomes.

a. Predictable Decision Making — Decision making must be derived from data and aligned to the organization’s strategic goals and objectives.

b. Predictable Planning — Work must flow through the organization to the teams that perform the work. This will result in higher productivity and quality which will have the added benefit of reducing costs.

c. Predictable Cadence — The best teams deliver high quality outcomes when they are allowed to work in a consistent cadence. Teams that are provided clear goals and outcomes, while being empowered to decide how best to accomplish these goals, will consistently meet and exceed expectations.

This non-framework approach to agility is called TAP2Change.

Notice nowhere is a framework mentioned in the Pillars, they are implied to some degree, but not required.

Additionally, Frameworks don’t work if we don’t develop the Transparency Pillar first. This is because the frameworks have an implicit assumption that we have transparent intent, tied to strategic goals and outcomes supported by leadership that creates an environment of empowerment for the people who do the which results in actual value delivery, which delivers long-term results.

TAP2 Change seeks to influence your organizations’ culture through so that you can approach solutions to challenges from a platform of commonality of purpose.

If you would like to learn more about how TAP2 Change and develop effective Agility in your organization, please reach out to me at michael@soundagile.com or visit our website at www.soundagile.com

Business Agility Requires Transforming Your PMO and Annual Planning Cycles

As a leader as you think about everything that needs to happen for your organization to be and remain competitive in a world that now has the ability to change direction in a moment’s notice, you likely aren’t thinking that Agile is what you need.

You are however thinking about things that equate to Agility.
One of the primary places you need and want to have Agility is in your Technology investment. Yet, that is one area that rarely changes when we think about being agile or developing agility.

To build a foundation for business agility you MUST change several things:
1. Annual Planning cycles must be replaced by continuous planning that does not focus on large project funding for long periods of time.
2. Funding must move from projects to supporting stable long-standing teams. Work must flow to your teams.
3. Plan by Value not by Cost by developing a Portfolio Valuation Model that forms the basis for your Intake model.
4. Develop an Investment mindset.
5. Develop an Innovation mindset that focuses on identifying ideas that can be developed in smaller value components allowing for better management of costs and risks associated with your technology investments.

You can’t develop a high level of business agility by maintaining the status quo on your funding and annual planning cycles.

Agility requires that we work in smaller increments of work that is strategically aligned to value and flows to teams in a consistent manner.

Expecting to develop Agility with large projects funded by annual planning cycles is an approach that many organizations still take, leading to frustration across the entire organization as your planning and delivery capabilities are mis-aligned.

If you want to learn more about how SoundAgile can help you transform the way that you flow work to your teams then connect with us at www.soundagile.com

Predictability in Agile isn't Bad, Just Really Misunderstood

As a business leader I have a lot of pressure to deliver consistent results as there are people who rely on my business for their livelihood, customers want to have predictable quality in the products they purchase and investors who make decisions to invest based upon the expectation of predictable financial results, the key work here is predictable.

In Agile if I speak about needing predictability from teams, I get strong pushback. There are of course reasons for that as most technology projects start with fixed date and scope and then are expected to deliver, because as a Business Leader I need predictability.

Leadership who is typically removed from the day-to-day work of technology teams expects the same commitment to predictable results that they are held to. Leaders who don’t deliver don’t stay Leaders for very long.

For technology teams to not be expected to have some level of predictability to their work is something that doesn’t resonate with leadership. In many ways they see Agile as a way to not make commitments or be held accountable in the same way they are.

The problem comes from where each group is coming from.

The leader seeks to tell their customers, investors, etc…concretely something that will occur in the future. Future sales, new product features, improved cost savings, etc.. are what these personas seek. The stock price for companies is based upon the future looking as predictable as it does today, investors HATE surprises.

To solve this problem, traditional project management was brought into the realm of software development and applied with the expectation that software development was as predictable as the construction industry, it's not.

Agile sought to address this misalignment by focusing on technical excellence (XP) and improving the way business and technology work together (Agile Manifesto).

Unfortunately, the key changes that must occur in an organization, which is the tight alignment of customer, business and technology have largely remained the unchanged.

What needs to change is that how work is defined and delivered which is aligned to value and broken down in small valuable increments that can be delivered. Leadership cannot expect large transformative projects that take months and months to complete to be managed without any risk or changes in direction, it’s just not realistic.

Where we need to focus then is building strong and stable teams who can deliver work predictably whether they are working on a POC to review with leadership, new features for our customers or implementing new systems that manage the business more effectively, everyone in the organization requires both predictability and accountability, two things that create a strong business and trusted relationships across the organization.

For Leaders put it in this perspective — Is it more valuable to deliver a $3 million dollar 18 month and not know if the value you seek will be delivered? Or is it more valuable to deliver a sub-set of capability for $300k in 3 months that delivers 70% of the entire value of the $3 million dollar project. Do you really want to spend another $2.7 million to deliver the rest of the 30% in value?

This is the value proposition that is essentially missed in Agile at the leadership level.

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.

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.