We’re Agile!
I hear a lot of organizations, departments, and teams talking about how Agile they are. As I talk to them more, I find there’s often a gap.
But before I begin, it’s important to know why you’re trying to be Agile. What are you trying to solve? I hear a lot of different reasons.
Sometimes I hear is because Agile allows things to get to market sooner. Okay…
Sometimes I hear that it allows for faster customer feedback. Yep… For sure.
Sometimes I hear that Agile can reduce risk. Well, it can certainly make things more visible, and allow risks to surface sooner, so sure.
Sometimes I hear that it costs less. I’m not so sure about that, but maybe.
Sometimes I hear other things, too.
When something looks simple (like Agile, Scrum, or Kanban), we do things without really understanding why we’re doing them. We emulate what we’ve seen, or heard.
We have daily standups. Do you know why?
We post information on whiteboards. Again, what are we hoping to achieve with this?
If we change some of what we do, we might not be getting all of the benefits of Agile.
I had a conversation recently with a team that is working on a new project. Doesn’t matter what. They’re working in an Agile way, and finding that they didn’t have a lot of structure, so there was lots of activity, but not a lot of progress. This isn’t uncommon. They were going to start with an understanding of our current process, mapping out all of the ways the thing they’re working on is currently done. Then, their plan was to move into a Design Thinking workshop, to identify the problems and come up with possible solutions. After determining the solutions, they’d design a new system. And finally, after all of this was done, they’d launch it with a pilot group to see if their improvements made a difference. Assuming they had, they’d then launch it globally.
The team was going to do this by working in two-week sprints. A few project team members had other responsibilities, so the team agreed to work together, in a collocated project room, every afternoon. They’d hold a stand-up and make their progress visible, to get the benefits out of Agile.
If you draw these steps out, it might look something like this:
Requirements Sprint
Design Sprint
Solution Sprint
Testing Sprint
Deployment Sprint
Operational Sprint
That looks eerily familiar with another process, which looks a bit like this:
Initiation Phase
Requirements Phase
Execution Phase
Testing Phase
Closing Phase
A couple of things come to mind. First, this group (and actually, the scenario I described above is a combination of at least three groups I’ve spoken with), is trying to emulate what they’ve seen, or heard, they’re supposed to do as an Agile team.
Our highest priority is to satisfy our customer through early and continuous delivery.
That means we want to find ways to get something to our customer as soon as possible. The sooner the better. Even if it’s not perfect, we can learn from our customers and find improvements.
In fact, that’s what we want to do! Rather than going through a discovery phase, let’s find something and fix it within our time boxed iteration, be that one, two, three, or even four weeks. That means taking something – one little thing – through all of the phases outlined above, and getting it into our customer’s hands. In the mostly-made-up example above, that would mean getting one idea through to our customers one week from now. What would it take to make that happen? What learning could we gain if we could get real-live customers to provide us feedback? Maybe it’s not a week. Maybe it’s two weeks. Or a month…
Speaking of time frames: one, two, three, four week sprints? If our goal is to satisfy our customers, we should “deliver frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale”. The sooner we can get something in our customers hands, the sooner we can start to get their feedback, allowing us to learn. The object is, at the end of whatever time frame you’re working with, you have something done (which means: launched) at the end of it.
In an Agile environment, what’s the most important thing for us to know we’re being successful? Our “primary measure of progress is working functionality”. (And yes, I slightly cheated with the wording on that; not everyone I interact with happens to be building software). As with the previous point, this means that until it’s in our customer’s hands, we’re not really making progress. We might think we are, but until we get customers to use whatever it is we’re looking to deliver to them, it’s only our best guess – a hypothesis.
And we need to validate our hypothesis by getting that working functionality to our customers.
In fact, from a lean perspective, anything created that our customer’s aren’t using is inventory. Inventory isn’t something we want, since there’s a cost to us, but is delivering no value.
But, perhaps my second favourite principle from the Agile Manifesto is that “simplicity – the art of maximizing the amount of work not done – is essential”. It’s possible that I’m going to find the best solution for my customers with the first thing I offer them, be it a new credit application, making a bill payment, or redeeming my rewards points. But what’s more important is that by making something available for my customer’s, I can learn and iterate on what I’ve done. This means I don’t need to build every costly feature I can think of, until there’s a business need for that feature.
By maximizing the amount of work I don’t do, I’ll actually be able to get more things that add value to my customers & my business done.
And if maximizing the amount of work not done is my second favourite, the most important thing about working in an Agile way, at least from my perspective, is that “at regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly”.
More than anything else, Agile, specifically the Scrum and Kanban frameworks, are continuous improvement frameworks. That’s it. Agile won’t solve any of your problems for you. What it will do is help highlight them. It’s up to you what you want to do about it. And it’s up to you to figure out ways of working better as a team, to deliver more value of higher quality to your customers.
What are some things you can do? This is a tough one. This really requires us to think about what we do, and how we do it, differently. But more importantly, we should start with understanding why we’re about to do something. Not only why we want to deliver something new to our customer, be they internal or external, but why we want to do it in an Agile way.
The Agile values & principles are really simple, but they’re not easy to bring to life.