The Organizational and Institutional fear of going fast

If you have worked in technology long enough you have experienced releases that failed spectacularly or had situations that happened due to a myriad of reasons, like the time when I had access to prod and released a SQL query, I thought I was testing in my test environment and I caused a huge performance issue to hit the environment at a peak time. Or how about the time a team made significant changes in a booking module that multiple different websites utilized, causing the booking capability to be disabled for all the other websites for many hours.

The point is that shit happens and when it does the natural reaction is to add layers of process to try to ensure that situations that have caused pain in the past don’t cause them in the future. And these processes are then kept as gospel even when the thing that caused the issue has been operationally or technically removed.

These are the environments that we live in and are the organizations that want help in becoming more agile. However, to accomplish that goal, we need to undo all the institutional processes that have been implemented to keep us from getting ahead of ourselves. And make no mistake about it, some of these processes become full-time jobs for people, so when we look to remove processes with say automation, they are naturally going to be resistant to operational agility.

For example, there are many ‘Agile’ organizations that still feature a separate UAT organization that is responsible for providing final testing before something goes to Production. These UAT groups exist even when there has been an investment in high levels of test automation and DevOps, both capabilities that are designed to improve quality and increase the speed of delivery. The goal of an organization is to remove UAT as an individual step to Production and embed UAT as part of the development process. Developing high levels of test automation and continuing to add to that as your teams add more functionalities provides the foundation for developing a progressive regression suite, which will replace your UAT function.

If going fast is the goal, then removing the operational and functional impediments is the objective. And to a large degree, only leaders and managers can make these changes happen as the processes that were created were done so to convey to them that things are under control.

To become more Agile, we need to address the underlying institutional fear that the wheels might come off if we do. But we can’t be afraid of making changes if higher quality and faster delivery of value is the game.

Need help? michael@soundagile.com