Agile Is Dead (Or so everyone tells us)

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.

Business Leaders Need to Understand Agile — It has NOTHING to do with Frameworks

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.

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

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.

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.

Currency for Change – Transformation Needs and Roadblocks

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Business leaders, those who run our organizations, continually look for strategies that deliver growth, synergy, profit and increased market share, to name a few.  They are judged and compensated based upon their ability to deliver results around financial or operational focal points.  Those leaders who manage a publicly traded company take on the added burden of providing predictable quarterly results year after year in order ensure a stable and growing stock price.

Many times new strategies require changes to your organization.  When attempting transformative organizational change, our focus is on changing the way that an organization operates at an organic level.  However our Leadership is rarely focused at this level, rather their focus is on the expected benefits of the desired change. They often fail to address the real organic element necessary for change, which are the very people who help manage and run their organization.  People will determine the final success or failure of any particular change management effort.

Change, the type that transforms an organization is often done so out of perceived need or stress event, such as new competitor or competitive products or disruptive technology.  Though the stress/threat may be very real to the survival of the organization.  Though the threat may be real the people working for the organization may not necessarily be motivated by changing how they work in order to respond to the perceived threat.  The reasons for this can be:

• We may not be connected to the threat in a real way, we don’t see how the threat impacts our job.

• We may not agree that the threat is real.

• We may not agree with or believe that the requested changes are the right approach or strategy.

• We simply may not care.

We are ultimately are creatures of habit, what worked in the past should work for us in the future, we come to expect outcomes based upon these past experiences.

Our natural world provides us with examples of how change is handled when stress is applied.  In nature change is a natural state and happens without negotiation, let me repeat that:

Change happens without negotiation.

Trees don’t talk to hills to see if they are ok that more trees are grown, the change happens naturally based upon the need of the environment not the want of the trees.  Organic change happens in reaction to a stress event and then the system responds by initiating change that provides the appropriate reaction in order to bring the system back into a steady state.  In this example there is no currency for change between actors in the system as the system operates in a manner which brings the system back into a static or healthy state without applying change management techniques to encourage adoption of the change.

Large human systems are unlike our natural counterpart on multiple levels, primarily due to the people who are the actors of the system.  Natural systems form a comprehensive whole were all of the sub systems work in synergy on a grand scale.  Human systems however don’t share this synergistic behavior and as such operate independently of each other and the stress of one organization may not have any association or perceived dependency with another organization.

When human organizations inject change into their system in response to a perceived threat they trigger a broad set of activities at impact people in that system.  Change in both our natural world and our organizational world has the primary goal of keeping the system healthy and strong, but whereas the natural system accepts change without negotiation the human system involves potentially significant negotiation which has the negative effect of diluting the positive impacts the desired changes are expected to deliver.

Why is this?  Much of it surrounds not taking the time to communicate WHY the change is necessary and understanding the currency of our organization to accept the change.

What is Currency for Change?  It is the perceived value that an individual will derive by participating in change.

Human systems require people to participate in change.  However in order to get them to fully engage in the change process we need to communicate WIIFME or What’s In It For ME?

Change requires that the people in your organization do some of the following:

1. Learn new things (software, processes, tools, etc..)

2. Take on new roles (Project Manager to Scrum Master)

3. Report to new people

4. Change the way that they manage

5. Change the way that the project manage

6. Change the way that you plan

7. Change the way they are compensated

Currency then is what an organization is willing to ‘pay’ people in their currency in order get them to actively engage in change.  Currency is individual and ultimately relates to how an individual perceives their place, influence and power within the organization, this will drive what their specific currency will be.

Currency for change relates closely with the motivational needs of employees.  For example, though we may understand why we need to exercise and eat better for a longer life we may not be motivated sufficiently to do this consistently long term unless we identify the real currency we require to make the necessary changes.

There are many different needs based theories that can help define individual currency for change:

1. Maslows’ hierarchy of needs:

   1. Physiological

   2. Safety

   3. Social

   4. Esteem

   5. Self-Actualization

   6. ERG Theory:

      1. Existence

      2. Relatedness

      3. Growth

      4. Acquired Needs Theory

         1. Need for Achievement

         2. Need for Affiliation

         3. Need for Power

         4. Three-Factor Theory for Employee Motivation

            1. Equity/Fairness

            2. Achievement

            3. Camaraderie

Parsing these different theories we come up with a few general themes:

1. People need to feel safe

2. People need to feel achievement

3. People need to be acknowledged

4. People need to feel connected to others

5. People need to learn or challenged

When we begin to craft a change management plan for our organization we need to engage in conversation that explores the currency of the people who will be engaged in the change.

When beginning the process of change we must clearly identify the Why as part of understanding and leveraging an individuals’ currency for change.  If you can’t clearly identify the why people need to change you won’t be able to develop the What and the How in order to sufficiently engage people at their motivational level which we translate into currency.

Understanding what people require in order to be incented to change, translates into currency because change doesn’t come without investment and that relates to WIIFE, what am I going to receive if I change?  And unfortunately simply staying employed may not be enough, especially with highly skilled and sought after knowledge workers, you must engage them in a much different manner and their currency won’t be continued employment or more money (typically).

What does currency look like?

1. Enagagement–

   1. Allow more control and input with respect to the change to your entire organization, don’t make it a one way street with no negotiation. Unlike our natural world where change happens without negotiation, people in your organization are the source of successful change management.

   2. Benefit – It’s doubtful that your change management team has thought of everything that is required to make the change successful. Engaging your organization to participate in building the strategic direction of the change will create strong ownership of the change.

   3. Needs Met –

      1. Need for Affiliation

      2. Social

      3. Esteem

      4. Camaraderie

1. Failure –

   1. We must understand that when we change our organization, the model by which we manage our organization also changes. Leaders and managers who have been successful in the organization are now faced with potentially dramatic changes with respect how they will manage and how they are perceived as successful.  Their very power base is threatened.  Encouraging a culture of failure as part of your change management efforts is essential for successful change.  Failure is not the goal, rather the mechanism that we use to encourage learning, because at its heart change is about learning and we all learn differently and we have different currency with respect to how we learn.

      1. Needs Met:

         1. Need to learn or be challenged.

         2. Safety

         3. Recognition –

            1. There are people in your organization who have vast experience and domain knowledge which has been vital to the success of the organization. Though these people may be the most resistant to change, they can conversely be your biggest proponents for change if approached the correct way.  These individuals often want more recognition than material things such as more money.  They fall more along the needs matrix identified by Maslow, they are looking more for Social and Physiological needs to be met but also need to feel safe during the change.

               1. Needs Met:

                  1. Safety

                  2. Acknowledgement

As you think of taking on transformational change you need to start the conversation around the needs and currencies of the people who are going to make your change management successful.

Change is hard and when not engaged properly is destined to under deliver or worse fail completely.