Agile, From Discovery to Delivery
Recently I was reflecting on my ‘agile’ journey and as a coach, I’ve noticed that what I focused on before I became a full-time coach was on working on finding ‘things’ that worked, be it UX Design sessions to provide input to get teams going quickly, User Story Mapping to convey context of a customer journey or using BDD to write contextually rich user stories.
In the organizations, I worked for where we were attempting to be more agile in our delivery abilities we weren’t concerned about whether Scrum should be done this way or that. No Scrum was just a small piece of how we developed and delivered the solutions our business asked of us.
In these situations, we took what we used to do and asked whether or not we could do it differently to be more agile in our processes. And when we found something wasn’t working each team would try something different and when something seemed to consistently work we’d share that with the other teams to try out. Over time making small incremental changes we went from something not working well in an agile context to something that resembled a mature way of working.
The change required engagement from the entire organization, everyone from VP down to the tester on the team had to change how the organization worked. Was it easy, no, was it fun, you bet!
Unfortunately, since I’ve moved into being a full-time agile coach I’ve found myself almost wholly focused on frameworks to help an organization move to agile. Why? Because that was what they were sold most times or that is what they think they need when they decided to go agile and hire a bunch of coaches.
But here’s the thing, what I learned working in those organizations, without the benefit (or hindrance in some cases) of an experienced agile coach was that agile requires a Discovery to Delivery mindset, not one that is framework forward.
Most of the frameworks we utilize to operationalize ‘agile’ pay little to no attention to the Ideation or Discovery part of agile delivery. The notion that we just start coding incrementally and deliver when we have something of ‘value’, is as altruistic as it is naïve for most organizations.
Agile cannot assume that money is no object, that we as technologists have an open pocketbook to draw from to pay for all of our experimentation. Ultimately what businesses need and want is for ‘stuff’ to be delivered. They frankly don’t care how it’s done, they just want things delivered, that don’t cost millions of dollars and are done so in a predictable manner. Agile fails many organizations in this context, but in truth, organizations fail agile as well.
Agile is a balancing act between freedom to explore possibilities and the discipline to deliver predictability (not on time, predictable cadence), thus the concept of Discovery to Delivery.
With a Discovery to Delivery approach to your agile transformation, you have a much better chance of realizing value from your investment in agile. This mindset opens up more holistic thinking of the organization, taking a more systemic over tactical approach.
If you are looking for effective coaches, find the ones who have had to figure out how to be agile from an end-to-end perspective. They are much harder to find as most coaches only have experience in the framework they are certified in. But we exist and we can help your journey.
