So, here’s the thing, how we manage our businesses has changed so fundamentally, that it’s often hard to understand and even if there are companies letting go of their agile support functions, they are more agile today than when they started and once an organization moves towards agile, even if they go back to older ways of working, it won’t be all the way back.
When I got out of college PCs had just made their way into organizations. I remember creating elaborate forecasting models in Lotus 123 that fundamentally changed how we managed our manufacturing inventory. To create these models, I had to manually add data from all sorts of input, from SMSA marketing reports put out by the government to green-lined production and sales data spit out by our mainframes. It took me months to assemble this information into the models we used for our annual planning. Can you imagine anyone doing this now?
Today we operate at warp speed with information at our fingertips captured in vast data lakes. One only needs to look at the massive investment in data management capabilities to understand that Data is King in the business management world. But here’s the thing, investing in data only gets you so far, you still need people to interpret the data and, in many ways, companies may have over-invested in their data capabilities.
These changes have occurred in my career, and I understood many years ago, either adapt to your surroundings or you will be left behind. Yes, there will be those that don’t, like the Regional Sales Manager who threw the PC I had just installed in the garbage or the other one who put it in a closet as soon as I left. Both people, regardless of their previous sales success, were let go from the company.
Business leaders today face ever-increasing challenges and frankly, the Agile industry has for the most part let them down. We blame them for our failures, but the reality is that we have been working with one hand tied behind our back, and we are the ones who did that. Leaders need to understand how their engagement in technical agility will change how they deliver value to the business and its customers. Let’s also be real in that most CEO’s did not take a technical career path, so they aren’t as connected to how technology is delivered. Their expectations are that projects are approved, work is completed to deliver whatever my leaders decided was important and I’m given updates on two things — Budget and progress, Agile doesn’t come into play in decision-making at my level, and Agile is a ‘technology’ thing.
Since they don’t understand and don’t engage, they keep us at a distance or worse ignore us.
So though there is a question about whether the investment in Agile has delivered sufficient value (it has but has more work to do) the reality is that Agile is a response to the way the world is changing. Let’s look back to the 1990s when Agile and Scrum had their foundational beginnings. It was during this time that we entered the dotcom era. There was a massive change in the technology landscape (the internet) and when a change like this happens money will follow. Can you imagine investors coming to a dotcom business only to be told, thanks for your investment we’ll let you know when we have a website in around 18 months…. That wasn’t going to happen. This is where Agile approaches provided the avenue for change.
Now that Agile is over 20 years old, it’s time to recognize what has worked (team productivity, and quality) and what hasn’t (traditional project management and funding still in place).
Things are continuing to change at a rapid pace, so much so that perhaps Agile in its current approach and mindset is not going to work. Agile needs to address what they have missed, which is leadership needs. Without providing a clear way for them to translate the way they want to manage into an Agile delivery model, Agile is yes going to fail to deliver on its value proposition and be excluded from the conversation at the highest levels of organizations.