Leaders — Agile is not at fault for your failure to be Agile
If your organization is struggling with Agile, it’s likely not the fault of Agile, rather it’s the fault of the leadership and management being unable or unwilling to make the necessary changes that will enable operational agility.
Agile was focused first and foremost on changing the way that we developed software and the impetus for this was the fast-changing technology landscape that started with the advent of the internet. Gone were the days when developing software was hard and making changes to it even harder and projects took a long time simply because it took a longer time to develop on mainframe systems than it does today.
And Scrum offered up a tantalizing new way of working, providing speed and transparency that simply didn’t exist prior to this. Unfortunately, the business processes of organizations stayed the same, so even though we saw the benefit of working in an agile way, companies simply were not interested in changing their entire organization to support a new way of developing software. In many cases in these early days, successful agile experiments ended with the company staying the course of its current ways of working.
Whether by design or by accident, larger consulting firms sensed an opportunity in trying to translate this new thing called agile into enterprise-wide transformations, doing so with newly minted Agile coaches they charged out at hundreds of dollars an hour, most of whom didn’t have any experience actually working in agile, and could do no more than site some lines in the Scrum Guide to provide any directional support.
And the need isn’t so much to ‘scale’ agile, but to update your operational business processes to support agile ways of working, but this takes time and effort. So, it’s not surprising that scaling frameworks popped up to attempt to address the need to help leaders who want to be agile, and it should not be surprising either that these scaling frameworks are rich in process overhead.
The problem with this overhead is that even though the frameworks convey a need to change the organization, they really don’t provide any meaningful insight as to how you can achieve operational agility. The end result is that you end up with two operational structures, one that actually runs your business and one that sits on the side and allows you to act as if you’re being agile. And when an important project is identified that project more than likely will get an exception to operate in a non-agile way.
Knowing the framework only gets you so far, the rest of the journey is on you the leaders of the organization to figure out, and for the most part, I’ve not seen organizations pick up the baton and run with it. Most coaches don’t have deep business or operational experience to draw off of when working with a company, relying on their knowledge of the framework as means of guidance. And even those coaches that are blessed with deep experience, find it hard to gain entrée into the executive level in a manner that allows us to influence the real change that is needed.
This is why I have created Practical Management for Agility to provide real-world examples of how to operationalize the frameworks to create real agile opportunities within the organization. And to be clear to everyone, a truly agile organization will not look like the organization you currently have, things must change to things to change.
Look for more and sign up to get updates as they happen at — www.soundagile.com/contact-us
