Managing your Business for Agility

Probably the biggest challenge that Agile has faced over the past 20 years is that it works in smaller settings where the environment for the team is isolated and has more control over how they work, as they aren’t plugged into the broader controls of the organization, such as the PMO.

We have of course now been working to ‘scale’ Agile so that the success we see in smaller team experiments can be translated into the organization at large. The problem is not with Agile, the problem is how companies manage their business. Running a business is vastly different from running a technology project, yet leaders expect to be able to control via processes that which cannot be controlled.

The technology platforms we work with are complex and complicated both because of the technology and probably more so because of the organizations’ rules and operating approach. As a leader when I’m talking with my Sales leaders, we talk about how we interact and influence the buyers of our products or services. Though this is a complicated endeavor it is a human interaction for the most part. And, marketing campaigns are just a series of hypotheses, that proposes a value outcome based upon an approach, which likely was derived from the analytics platform that was developed by our technology teams. As a business leader who wouldn’t continue to invest in a marketing campaign that doesn’t deliver value.

Technology has changed over the years, from mainframe systems that took months to change if any change in direction would have significant risks to having to go back and change the architecture and code, and now we can code new features in a few weeks and have them in the hands of our customers. The problem is that business leadership is still managing technology as if it was still in the 1960s, which is the reason that we see Agile failing at scale. While they may not apply command and control to their sales and marketing functions, they continue to apply it to a technology function that simply cannot be managed in that way, and frankly never could.

If you want to ‘scale’ agility across the organization, you need to change some ways of managing the business:

1. Focus projects on value-based outcomes that are shorter-term in nature.

a. What changes?

i. Leaders are engaged consistently and are making data-driven decisions related to the value outcomes over large monolithic projects with pre-determined scope and dates.

ii. The organization must develop a value-based scoring model that provides a value-scoring approach to value identification.

2. Overhaul the funding model — Move away from project-based funding and identify the level of investment needed to support stable teams who are responsible for value delivery.

a. What changes? –

i. Though the amount of investment being made won’t change, what will change is the overhead associated with managing individual P&Ls for each project that is funded.

ii. Amortization of your technology investment is realized faster and more consistently.

iii. A reduction in investment in capabilities that aren’t delivering value. In waterfall projects with scope and date fixed, everything is delivered or nothing is delivered, neither of which translates into a good investment strategy.

3. Leadership Engagement

a. What Changes?

i. Leadership must establish a meaningful way to engage with the outcomes that their teams are delivering.

ii. Leadership must also align on a decision-making process that supports changes in direction due to a lack of value being delivered.

iii. Leaders align to a holistic approach to value that is aligned with the company’s strategies.

4. People Management

a. What changes?

i. Empowering people to determine how best to work. This does not mean they have carte blanche to decide everything. As leaders, you must put align your strategic vision to your operational capabilities. Ensure that your technology teams are aware of the outcomes necessary to deliver value to the organization. If one team decides to work in Kanban, another Scrum, or another something else entirely, let them. So long as they deliver what is being asked in a manner that leadership can make informed value decisions, how they work shouldn’t be as big of a concern.

ii. Managers move away from managing work to managing the careers of their people and developing and maturing relationships with their peers. Additionally, their focus should be on the future. This will require significant re-education and reinforcement from upper management. This may be the hardest change but without it, none of the other changes can change the organization toward organizational agility.

Ultimately Leaders own whatever happens in their organization. Unfortunately, Agile has been pitched as something that can be easily ‘scaled’ by following a framework. The reality is that frameworks only get you so far and some take you in the opposite direction of organizational agility while telling you that they are the only ones who understand it.

The truth is that every organization is different and unique, even those that may compete in the same market space. So the notion that a generic framework can make your organization Agile is crazy on the surface. As a leader don’t fall into the trap that you can purchase an agile framework as a way to avoid the hard work of changing your organization to support agility. Your organization doesn’t operate as the frameworks advise and nor should they.

Frameworks are like ingredients to a recipe, as a coach/consultant who has helped organizations become more agile, and agnostic of frameworks, I know that they are just a piece of the overall agility puzzle. Running a successful business is hard, complicated, and evolves over time. You need to allow time to move towards agility and not treat it like a project where the output is agile.