I’m a businessperson first and foremost, having led several companies. As someone who has been involved with Agile for 20 years, I struggle with the myopic nature of what Agile has become, which is almost entirely focused on implementing and mastering an Agile framework.
Agile is now mostly about the operational optimization of a framework with value delivery an assumed attribute, but Agile hasn’t established an effective way to understand or identify value. Teams are expected to understand what it is and how to deliver it. The problem with this is that to deliver long-term value to my business I need to understand what I need to invest in first. Value delivery is entirely dependent on investing in the right things at the right time for the right reasons. Satisfying my customers is certainly important but there are so many peripheral aspects of my business that aren’t tied directly to customer satisfaction that also require that we make smart investments. And investment decisions should be coming from leadership with them directly tied to strategic outcomes.
Every part of the organization has strategic needs, but often what my operational leaders provide for funding are things they want or think will be valuable to them, and many times these requests end up creating organizational dissonance as the initiatives being approved aren’t functionally or strategically aligned. There isn’t an Agile framework out there that has provided a solution that helps organizations optimize their value stream investments so that they both understand the outcomes that are expected and how we will deliver on those outcomes. Value in Agile is not quantified, it’s either inferred or objectively assigned by people who are required to commit to the delivery of value, rather they are committed to delivering the project, which may or may not deliver value.
For Agile to succeed as a business framework we need to have a clear and unambiguous way to quantify value, prioritize it and confirm that the value we planned for is delivered. Failure to provide this is operational malpractice and yet we spend millions of dollars working to implement frameworks that have no hope of making your organization agile, at best you get some improved levels of transparency but without optimizing your delivery capabilities around value then Agile as it is configured today will only get you so far from an investment return perspective.