The truth is, doing agile especially atA team level?” isn’t at all the same as being an agile business. Frankly, doing agile is not of much real value. And it’s not the team’s fault. Too often they?re building the wrong things because the company doesn’t have a way to connect strategy and execution.
These employees”have a hole a chasm right in the middle of their organisation. Bosses that learn how to bridge this chasm can invest in the right things and build them the right way; but most importantly, they can regularly and inexpensively change what they are building to stay ahead of their markets and generate the most value from their development effort.
That’s the promise of lean/agile at scale, of truly becoming an agile business. But how do you get there
Lost on scrum island
The first three things to consider are: (1) How are your teams structured (2) How does work flow to teams” (3) How do you plan” Typical answers focus on the number of teams, roles, technologies, processes, estimating story value, sprints lengths, and so on. We can always improve team-level disciplines, but so what?
Everybody has Scrum teams. Scrum won’t solve the big problems facing your company. In fact, if all you do is implement these individual Scrum teams, you’re probably worse off than when you were doing waterfall.
Let that sink in the agile guy said we re better off doing waterfall. Here’s why: In waterfall, we make decisions up front when we know the least about the work. Experience tells us projects will be late and over budget, but we will know what is built because scope is fixed. Compare this to what I call ?Feral Scrum” optimised teams that deliver software fast. They?re on Scrum Island doing their own thing.
Sometimes their only connection to the organisation is a single, shared product owner. They are putting a lot of something into production, but we don’t know if what they deliver is what we truly need right now.
Read on to find out how to turn your business into an agile one
The problem at the top
Let’s put aside that great team-level execution has failed to solve our business problems, and move to how work gets planned and staffed. Here, conversations shift to project charters, business cases, funding and resource approvals. We discuss how often they plan, who’s involved and how much time and effort it takes.
One client told me their annual plan approved 71 projects for their BI teams, and that all 71 were currently active ?because managers need to see progress. Half were holdovers from the previous year. The final blow landed when they told me they expected none of the projects would wrap up this year!
We can solve this WIP problem by giving it the Kanban treatment. Prioritise projects by value to the business, list steps a project must pass, and limit how much work can be in progress?. Teams only pull new work when current work is done. Presto! Project delivery becomes predictable and we re only building what the business values most. We ve solved our problems, right” No.
Becoming an agile business
Markets change every day. New customer demands never stop. Survival depends on being able to regularly, and inexpensively, change portfolios of projects to stay ahead of new business realities. To shorten the time it takes to select winning ideas and consistently deliver them to customers requires that we solve the disconnect between our strategies and the work of our teams.
The answer lies in how to break down initiatives, keep teams aligned with changing priorities, automate progress reporting, and choose metrics that drive continuous improvement. At the core of this is a quarterly group planning ceremony, Big Room Planning, where teams and leaders align to build shared, realistic release plans everyone can commit to.
Now each team’s work stays aligned with strategy changes, and Scrum teams can ?look up” to understand the rationale behind what they are building, and how their work contributes to company strategy. But, we need one more thing.
Feed your agile culture
An agile business knows that strategy, capabilities and culture have to be designed together to achieve real organisational change. Culture results from how people interact, so we seek interactions that promote constant learning and improving?” retrospectives and good performance metrics help.
Finally, we re not just doing agile, were being agile. We ve got everything necessary to solve our big problems. We are focused on creating customer value instead of just creating process. We ve bridged the chasm in the middle of our organisation and now we can actively steer our company in response to the changes in our markets, truly becoming an agile business.
Doug Dockeryis director?of agile managementAt CA Technologies
