How Can I Start to be Agile?
There’s a lot of interest in getting started. In being Agile. In doing the cool stuff you’ve heard about from others. But how might you get started?
Well, no matter what department or team you’re currently a part of, there are things you can do. And none of this is hard. It just takes time and effort. What follows is one step-by-step way to start. This certainly isn’t the only way, but it’s an option. Take what follows with a grain of salt – this is a very generic approach.
Before you start anything, make sure you know why you’re about to embark on this journey. I’m going to assume, since you’re still reading this post that you know there’s something you want to improve. It might be worth having a look at what Agile has to offer. Here’s a link to one perspective of the value proposition of what Agile has to offer. And it’s also worth looking at the Values outlined in the Agile Manifesto , as well as the Twelve Principles behind the Agile Manifesto . While the Agile Manifesto was written by software developers, you can apply it to your domain by replacing “working software” with “business value”.
Finally, before I get to some steps you can try, I need to remind you that the goal isn’t to be agile.
And it’s even more important that we remember that we’re not trying to be agile for the sake of agile. We’re trying to make it a better place to work, for both us as employees, and with better products, services, and experiences for our customers.
The real answer to the question “How do I start to be Agile” is to live the values and principles outlined in the above links.
Now that we’ve got all that out of the way, if you’re looking for something actionable to get going, here’s a place to start:
Start with what you do now. Seriously. This isn’t about a massive change. The change part comes in when you identify reasons to change!
Understand why you & your team exist:
What service do you provide to others?
Who do you provide your services to?
Who provides services to you that you’re dependent on?
Make your work visible.
Here are a couple of links to examples:
The key is to build your board so it matches the flow of work. Don’t copy what someone else has done! The board needs to map directly to your workflow. And don’t worry if you get it wrong. I tell every team I coach & work with that if their board looks the same in a month from now, they’re doing it wrong. It’s supposed to evolve, so just get it started now.
One suggestion is to start by drawing out how your work flow, as you understand it today, from the original idea until it’s in the customer’s hands. A whiteboard, or on a larger sheet of paper which you can hang in your work area, is a pretty good place to start. And start with done, and work backwards.
And along the way (and this often gets overlooked), make sure you’re building the right thing! Make sure you’re solving a real problem, for a real customer, at the right time. There are lots of blog posts, articles, videos, and approaches that discuss this. It’s really important. There’s nothing worse than producing something on time, on scope, and on budget, that should never have been built in the first place.
In the following days, weeks, and months, review your work:
Does it make sense?
What steps or phases are missing?
What patterns are you seeing?
Is there something you can change that you think might help?
These four ideas are just places to start. They seem simple, and maybe they are. In most cases, my experience has been that they’re not as simple as they look.
Don’t rush through this! In my experience, getting to a stable place when considering the questions in step four is months. Maybe even quarters.
Let’s say you’ve done that. What might be next?
There’s a lot you can do next. Here are just a few ideas. But before you jump into this section, I’m really going to strongly encourage you to not to try to get to this too fast. Go back and look at point #4 in the last section. Really think about that, and explore it with your full team. Has anything change with your answers to the questions in #2 from the first section above? Have you learnt anything new that you should consider? Are you really ready to move on? If so…
Agree to pursue improvement through evolutionary change. That means that everyone on the team needs to agree that you’re going to find ways to improve what you’re doing, in a way that works for you. It won’t be the same as someone else, but it might be. Just don’t copy for the sake of copying!
Does everyone understand what’s required to move an item from one stage of your workflow to the next? Not just those on your team, but those who you depend on, and those who depend on you? Make the policies explicit & visible.
Now that your work is visible, limit your Work In Progress (WIP). Try to get things through your flow faster. It’s not about starting work, but about completing it.
How long is it taking from the time you start working on one item until it’s done?
How might you reduce that time?
Do you have the right people, with the right skills, on your team?
Where in your workflow are things getting stuck? What’s causing that?
Review your workflow:
Does it make sense?
What steps or phases are missing?
What patterns are you seeing?
Is there something you can change that you think might help?
That’s hard. Again, I know it sounds simple. But it’s really quite hard to do well. I know those steps, and questions, can be really, really tough if you’re really reflecting and putting the effort to improve and evolve.
Again, don’t rush. It’s more important to explore what’s working and what isn’t. Any Agile framework isn’t a methodology – it’s just a framework designed to expose opportunities for improvements. But actually doing the improvements is where the real value comes in, and where the real benefits are. There’s no magical time for these items. I’d suggest you think about timelines for this section in terms of quarters (as in multiple quarters!), possibly years. In fact, if you’re doing all of the above things, you should continue finding improvements…
There’s a little more though. But don’t start here. Maybe look at this a little later, perhaps.
How long is work waiting until you start working on it? What can you do to reduce this lead time?
Encourage acts of leadership at every level. Do you do this?
Is everyone empowered and encouraged to try something different from what you’re doing now, to help you improve?
Wait a second. Improve what? Everything. Put everything on the table, including those things that you hold to be absolute truths. This is where real change and real improvements can come through. If you let them.
Do you have an explicit feedback loop to get input on what’s working well, and what isn’t?
Does everyone on your team know what they are?
What are you doing about them?
And yes, there’s more beyond this, too. But this should give you an idea of the journey you may want to go on. Notice how the questions and steps all build on each other?
The key message throughout is one of continuous learning, and being open to the possibilities of changing and improving.
Collaborating or Cooperating?
I had the opportunity to attend a workshop last week, and this question came out in the discussion during one of the days.
Do we collaborate, or cooperate, with others on our teams, and with other teams?
It got me thinking. First of all, I wasn’t sure there was really a significant difference. But the more we talked about it, the more I realized that there is a difference. And it’s not a trivial difference. One isn’t better than the other. They’re just different, and they each offer something.
When we cooperate, we agree to work together, but on our own things.
I know how to do something, and you know how to do something. But we both need to complete our work in order to deliver whatever it is that we’re doing. So we each work on what we know, put it together, and volià! We do our own work, and we make sure it fits in with the work the others I’m cooperating with.
When we collaborate, we work together, on the same thing.
This likely sounds a bit odd. I know how to do something, and I’m pretty good at it. You also know how to do that same something, but you’re not as good as me. And, there’s something else that needs to get done. Why on Earth would we collaborate, when we could just cooperate?
The more I thought and reflected on this, the more I came to this conclusion:
When the type of work is so simple that I know how to do it myself, or it’s straight forward in the solution, I can do it myself. And I can cooperate with others who are also working on simple items. We can work together to make sure whatever it is we’re doing goes together neatly.
When the type of work doesn’t have a simple, straightforward, or obvious solution, I benefit by collaborating with others to come up with a potential solution. It’s likely a potential solution because it’s not simple, it’s not obvious, and we can’t be sure our solution will work.
In this case, it’s not about getting the most out of us, but rather getting the best out of our combined knowledge, skills, and experience.
When I cook with my wife, Kathy, and we’re following a recipe, we cooperate. I chop the onions and garlic, while she melts the butter in the saucepan. Once I’m done the onions, I go on to grilling the steak, while she sautés the onions & onions I’ve just cut in the pan with the melted butter, and adds in a bit of salt and pepper. See? That’s us cooperating.
When we’re planning a family vacation, we collaborate. For us, it’s as much about where we go, as how we get there. So while Kathy typically picks the destination on her own (or proposes a couple of ideas), we figure out how we’re going to get there together. That means we look at the map together, and think about how far we can drive before our kids drive us nuts. We look at landmarks, parks, shops, and other sights along the road and talk about which we’re going to stop at, and which we’re going to skip (which is important, because my wife would have us stopping at all of the shops). We figure out how each decision we make impacts where we’re going to spend each night, and how we can optimize the number of things we get to see and do so everyone in the family gets to see and do things that are of interest to them. This isn’t always simple. And often results in a bit of negotiating, but we do it by collaborating with each other.
Sometimes, we’ll want to research something that we’re going to pass along the way. In the context of collaborating, we’ll jump into coordinating. I’ll research the various nature walks in the park we’re going to be driving through so I can see as many waterfalls as possible. Kathy will look into the shops in the town just outside the park. We’ll have boundaries – I have to find the walks & waterfalls that we can do within three hours, while Kathy finds the three most important shops she wants to see (which typically means she picks seven or eight, and we end up stopping at ten to twelve).
While we’re cooperating, we’re leveraging our individual interests and experiences.
We keep each other, and our children, in mind – I don’t pick the crazy hard walk since our 7-year-old daughter won’t be able to keep up, while she considers the shops our fourteen-year-old son might be interested in.
While we’re collaborating, we’re building our combined understanding of what our experience will involve. We build a shared understanding of what it is we’re going to do on our vacation.
We need to do both.
When I think of how this applies to work, there are times when I need to cooperate with others, and there are times I need to collaborate with others. There are times when my work is simple enough that I can do it on my own, making sure it aligns and integrates with what my colleagues are working on. There are also times at work when I need to collaborate with others because we work in a complex environment, and I don’t have all the skills and expertise to arrive at the hypothesis that’s most likely to result in a great result.
I’d suggest that cooperating allows us to get the most out of everyone, and collaborating allows us to get the best from everyone. I believe we need both.
Functional Fixedness
Let’s say you have a candle, a box of thumbtacks, and a book of matches. Can you figure out a way to affix the candle to the wall in such a way that when lit, the wax will not drip onto the floor?
There’s a psychological bias that sometimes prevents us from seeing possible solutions that are right in front of us. One common bias is called functional fixedness.
Last summer, I was lucky enough to spend a number of weeks in Alaska. As part of this trip, I got to spend a bit of time on the Mendenhall Glacier, where some beautiful glacial water happened to be flowing. Not expecting it, I didn’t have a cup or glass or container to use to drink the water. It was a little below the surface, so lying down and putting my face directly in the water wasn’t really an option – I guess I could have made it work. But being the creative person I am, I used a flash diffuser I happened to have in my camera bag, while others who were with me couldn’t enjoy the pure, ice cold, crystal clear, glacier water.
When it comes to innovation, people and businesses are constantly hampered by functional fixedness (and other biases), which causes us to overlook elegant solutions hidden in plain sight.
Consider deflating a soccer ball and using it as a bowl. Why not?
Sometimes, the words we use constrain our thinking. It’s important to use the most generic words when we first start talking about a problem or an opportunity.
There’s a great quote about buying a drill. The quote is that people don’t want a drill; what they want is a hole.
But I’d like to take this a bit further – we don’t really want a hole. What we want is somewhere to put in a bolt. But even that isn’t what we want. What we really want is to bolt pieces of wood together. And we could explore that further by understanding why we want to connect those pieces of wood. Maybe there’s a better solution. Maybe not. What if I changed my goal to “connect” pieces of wood? What if I used the word adhere. Or laminate. Or join. Do different possibilities come to mind when I simply change the word? A functional fixedness can be caused by how the problem is framed.
The most dangerous words I hear in organizations are “that’s how we do it here”.
By the way, here’s a solution to the candle problem I started this post with:
If you empty the box of thumbtacks, you can attach the candle to the inside of the empty box with some melted wax, and then tack the box to the wall. The box acts as a shelf that supports the candle and catches the dripping wax. Because the box is presented as simply a container to hold the tacks, it’s often difficult to see it as anything else.
It’s Duncker’s Candle Problem.
As you’re going through your day, challenge those things you consider absolutes.