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.