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I keep hearing leaders say they're struggling to manage their organizations through change. They've had trouble getting their organization to adopt Agile. They're finding it challenging to find the right talent. They're struggling to establish the right level of transparency.
These are symptoms of the people in the organization not managing their time effectively.
When a lot of organizations are transitioning from the way they used to work to a more cross-functional, agile squad way of work, they usually look for scaling frameworks to help them do it. They're usually worried about how to scale the practices, but the thing that really gets in the way is scaling the decision making and approvals. This is especially true when we have centralized, rather than distributed functions.
You need to start with a conversation. When we kick teams off, there are a lot of groups that feel they need to have their stamp of approval on things before they go out the door. Some of these are due to a need for regulatory compliance, which involves significant risks and possible audits. We need to figure out how to do these efficiently and systematically.
When organizations begin their journey toward agility, they think the business outcomes will become instantaneous. They expect the initial decision to lead to immediate success.
Moving towards Agile from a more traditional way of working changes so many things about how we work. It changes who we interact with, and has us moving from building others solutions to becoming problem solvers. We're creating solutions in a more integrated way, moving from predict and control to build - measure - learn - sense - respond. Agile teams need to learn new skills — both in domain knowledge and critical new "soft" skills. Agile is a new game with new rules.
Organizations are always on the lookout to cut costs and scale back when they have unfavorable reporting periods. Hiring freezes and cutbacks in training and traveling tend to be popular and convenient. These costs are tangible and easy to track. These are only marginal to the true savings they could get by removing the "invisible taxes" most organizations are paying without even tracking.
Organizations are spending valuable money on invisible costs. Cost of delay, cost of multi-tasking, and cost of meetings. In organizations running Agile, these costs are amplified due to the impact of short time boxes.
In the last decade, we have realized that we cannot plan everything up front in a linear process to develop software. We are solving complex problems, which requires us to use an empirical process, lean UX practices, and a supporting technology platform that allows us to build, measure, learn and apply the learning in a repeatable fashion. This allows us to move from trying to predict everything about the future towards shared learning from the present.
Although we are getting gains from people using Agile practices to get increments of work done, most enterprise organizations are not taking advantage of developing iteratively. They still put effort to fully polish a feature before releasing to see how customers respond to that feature, primarily because they are funded and managed as a project, instead of a product lifecycle. “If we do not fully build this feature, we may never get the budget again” is the tired excuse I always hear.
I just celebrated my 48th birthday. This is quite a milestone because, being born with Cerebral Palsy, the odds were not in my favor to reach this age, let alone a professional career in leading change and leading leaders.
I reflect back on my career and all the late hours I would put in to prove to others and myself that I could make a huge impact. This helped me deliver products to market, gave me the opportunity to fail and grow, and be an amazing individual contributor because I had enough energy to tackle everything that came my way. Now at 48, I do not have the energy I once had. The need to focus my energy on the right thing and not everything. I need to put my trust in others to accomplish things.
One common misconception of Agile is that it simply allows you to get everything done faster. This is simply not true. Agile allows us to plan a much smaller scope of work, delivering iteratively and incrementally to deliver the least amount scope needed to solve the problem/capture the opportunity. The speed comes from only delivering what the customer needed. This is in contrast to how we used to scope a release when we delivered everything we thought they might want.
This is stakeholder debt. I define stakeholder debt as the difference between everything they scoped for the release, minus what the customer uses.