Do you need to Implement Agile or Just Develop Agility?

Agile has now been around for around 20 years, and the foundations for it with Scrum and xP many years before that.

What this tells us is that since the 1990’s people in technology have identified that to help deliver value effectively, business and technology had to change the way that they work.

To support this change Agile frameworks were created and unfortunately, these frameworks were mostly centered on changing the way technology teams operated.

So going ‘Agile’ has been almost solely associated with implementing a framework into the organization, and this has been almost entirely associated with Technology, not the Business.

We have enough empirical evidence to show that frameworks don’t make an organization Agile, they can provide a foundation but to rely on them entirely for business agility is a mistake and they won’t provide the value you seek in the investment you are making in agile.

So how do you become more Agile? By creating a new frame for your conversation.

Don’t make it about frameworks, instead focus on defining what Agility means to the organization. And more importantly how that is enabled across the organization, and not relying on a framework to be the enabling aspect of your agility.

So what does agility look like?

• It starts with a holistic understanding of your organization’s value stream. Your Strategies should align operationally to your value streams, because if they don’t then you are going to be making investments in technology and capability solutions that aren’t aligned to where the real value in your organization exists.
• Next, ensure you have a clear understanding of the capabilities that support your value streams. Organize your long-standing teams around these capabilities, not the applications that support your operations. Organizations spend vast amounts of time, money, and arguments about what a product is, instead you need to focus on capabilities. Where a ‘product’ makes sense identify it.
• From a Finance perspective, fund teams, not projects. This represents one of the largest and often most politically charged changes in organizations trying to develop agility. You simply cannot develop flow if you fund projects every year. Flow provides flexibility and flexibility enhances agility.
• With flow as a central focus of the organization, optimizing your value stream and operational capabilities becomes much clearer and less complicated and confrontational.
• Flow is also enhanced with the development of a Portfolio Valuation model, which is tied to your strategies, and supports continuous planning and delivery. The conversation now becomes what makes good investments, over getting lost in the cost conversation of hundreds of projects.
• Agility is also enhanced when leaders are focused on value optimization over territory and influence. And agility is maximized when people who do the work are empowered to decide how best to work.

You can scale in this environment but it takes clear transparency for your teams to understand what the goals and objectives of the business are. If everyone is aligned to purpose, then however we get to an outcome should be acceptable.

Building a level of predictability in your delivery capability provides the foundational confidence that business leadership seeks.

Agility then becomes a continuous focus on asking one question — Is how we are working Agile?

• You will define what Agility means for your organization, but aspirationally you are seeking to be as optimally effective in the delivery of value at any given moment in time.
• If the answer to any of these questions is no, then the question you face is — what will you do to change it? And more importantly from an organizational perspective, what change are you willing to let happen?

The real question here is how many of your personal and organizational beliefs are you willing to let go to develop improved agility? That is a scary place if you have been successful doing something a different way for the majority of your career.

Notice that none of what I talked about references any framework. Instead what you hear is agility requires Transparency, Accountability, and Predictability (TAP2 Change) that is aligned with the organization’s strategies, goals, and objectives.

If you choose to use Scrum, SAFe, DAD, LeSS, etc….that is your choice but do so knowing that they are just a piece of a larger puzzle and aren’t what makes your organization ‘Agile’.

At their best, the frameworks will help highlight what isn’t working and provide insight and information on where you want to focus your change efforts at.

Agile as we know it today is something we bring in from the outside.

Agility is what we are able and willing to do from within.