Top dos and don’ts for executive to consider when adopting agile at scale

Who am I?

I have about 20 years plus technology implementation experience, approximately 10 of those has been focusing on agile enablement and lean IT capability consultant. I am the founding architect for the Deloitte Agile practice in Canada.

I am also a founding fellow of the Lean Systems Society, and the the author of the Lean Change Method.

I blog frequently at agileconsulting.blogspot.ca

Jeff Anderson

Why do we care about Agile anyway?

Organizations that follow traditional methods are unable to keep pace with constant change and problem complexity

Business demand that continually outpaces technology’s ability to deliver

Long delivery lead times that interfere with quality and needlessly raise cost

Poor collaboration that increase unnecessary rework and churn

The inability to deliver the right product at the right cost, and right speed

There are a number of compelling reasons for technology executives to seriously consider adoption of agile for their organization

Accelerate Delivery and Grow Revenue

Reduce Costs and Do More with Less

Modernize Delivery Capability for Big Business Transformation

We need to rethink how the organization does delivery and change the delivery processes and culture to move at speed

Advance the level of current management capability with modern management methods

Increase delivery speed from 3 months to 2 weeks

Restructure the delivery organization into cross-functional teams to optimize output

Design new delivery processes that integrate together to enable speed

Build the appropriate development infrastructure to automate as much as possible

Reshape the culture where continuous improvement is a way of life

Improve delivery throughput by 100+%

Up the talent and collaborative culture

How we manage organizations

How we organize teams

How we deliver solutions

How we manage delivery quality

How we operate and improve

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Top do’s and don’ts to consider when when adopting agile

Avoid top-down, outside-in change.

Put adoptees in the driver seat of change, bootstrapping a test and learn approach

Resist the urge to deploy change Big Bang.

Adopt agile in small increments, taking advantage of feedback to evolve the agile “solution”

Refrain from a deluge of agile propaganda, and one way communication

Introduce cultural “hacks” to instill new ethics and principles

Abandoned the notion that agile is a methodology that is applied on a project by project basis

Rollout agile on a team by team basis, choosing practices based on specific needs for each team

Don’t measure progress and productivity like you are running a factory

Treat metrics as a way to capture social collaboration and connectivity in the enterprise

• The right change tactics through constant collaboration and negotiation between change agents and change participants

• Co-ownership of the change model transform change resisters into change champions

• The right change solution is refined through continual iteration and experimentationYou now possess a continuous delivery model that truly meets the needs of all levels of the organization

A "waterfall" approach to agile change creates an environment of severe risk for an agile transformation program

Performance can drop significantly in the medium-term, increasing the resistance to adoption of the new methods

Forklifting in an existing agile method will guarantee a delivery method not fit for purpose and suited to your context

Absorbing the method in a big batch will result in change burnout, as a result adoption stalls before it's complete

Manage agile adoption as an agile project, using co-creation, iterations, and constant learning; building a test and learn mindset immediately

Bootstrapping agile adoption through an “agile” change approach, has the positive benefits of an immediate impact to the culture of people participating in the change

Design & plan each change so that impacted teams, rather than change agents “own” the change

Deploy small changes iteratively, using a lifecycle that enforces a experiment and learn mindset

Because change stakeholders are in the drivers seat, they are immediately armed with the change tools that allow

them to learn their way to the right agile solution

Manage agile change risk by iteratively testing small changes that are designed by both change agents and change stakeholders

Scale out change co-creation and learning enterprise wide, building an ecosystem of continuous improvement

By putting adoptees in the driver seat of change, they learn how to become comfortable with a test and learn approach right from the beginning

“Cultural hacks” provide tangible methods and concrete opportunities to promote an agile mindset across the organization

Example: Executive InquiryWhenever you, the executive are asked by a direct report to approve a decision, you inquire as to whether the decision will foster an agile culture or inhibit one by asking four questions. Will the decision?1. Increase trust and reduce the need for expensive and time-

consuming bureaucracy?2. Encourage moving forward with incomplete information, or

will it cause people to be more comfortable waiting for the perfect plan?

3. Reduce or increase the amount of unfinished work?4. Foster a fail fast experiment driven mindset, or cause people

to avoid mistakes at the expense of learning?

Other cultural hacks include:5. “Lean Coffee” leadership sessions with teams6. “Social Pressure Zones – Information Radiators in public

spaces, team hangout areas, highly visible standups, etc.7. Cooperate-tition - teams responsible for improving metrics

for their entire department, departments responsible for their entire division, etc.

9 Tech Webcast – Pragmatic ways to leverage Lean/Agile techniques to increase technology delivery efficiency

• Building a “fixed” agile SDLC, and then allowing teams to use it depending on the nature of the project is a recipe for disaster

• Regardless of what agile practices are adopted (or not) when teams use agile it will (positively) disrupt and result in a new thinking model.

• Teams will be unable and unwilling to shift from waterfall to agile and back again based on the current project they are working on. This will cause churn, confusion, and a “broken” delivery engine.

• Furthermore the whole point of agile is to enable adaptability to constant change, prescribing a fixed approach, even an agile one, defeats the whole purpose of agility

• The good news is that there is a wealth of agile methods and practices that when pragmatically applied, can support the entire range of technology knowledge work, from legacy operations all the way to mobile apps

• Focused agile adoption on instilling the thinking tools, continuous improvement methods, and mechanisms that provide feedback. This will enable teams enable teams to design and operate an agile system of work, one that can adapt to constant change, a prerequisite for agile thinking.

Agile is a mindset that is adopted by teams, not a set of processes to be used on particular projects

10 Tech Webcast – Pragmatic ways to leverage Lean/Agile techniques to increase technology delivery efficiency

• Agile methods are based on the principal, taken from manufacturing, that working on fewer things at a time will allow you collaborate more, fix problems faster, and accelerate

• That being said, delivering business change is not the same as delivering widgets through a factory

• In effect, you are trying to increase the number of times you can collaborate with the business to effectively deliver on a tangible unit of business value

• You are trying to improve the quality of conversations that you’re having both with the business, and with other knowledge workers, and reduce the leadtime between those conversations

• You are measuring social collaboration, and require the goodwill of all involved to effectively measure, identify obstacles, and implementing improvement

• Setting arbitrary targets, chastising people for poor performance, and rating individuals against each other will cause people to game the system and give you the number that you want.

• Organizations who have successfully used agile at scale identify the metrics they want to measure based on the problem they are trying to solve at the time, investigate root cause, and empower line staff to fix those problems.

• Potential “fixes” are piloted, evaluated for success or failure, and rolled out if appropriate, in either case organizational learning takes place, the true measure of agility

Leaders can measure agility, but only if the understand what they are measuring, why they are measuring it, and what they want to do about it

• Regardless of how incremental the adoption approach is, or what agile methods are adopted, the need for agility will impact your organization’s existing team structure

• The right team structure empowers teams to effectively self organize in the pursuit of business objectives. Agreeing on how to govern ongoing team changes in response to new business demand is equally critical.

• Thinking about the organization as a network versus a hierarchy is a helpful tool to conceptualize how an agile organization function

Aligning team structure to service customer defined profiles of demand, is perhaps the most crucial, and most challenging, aspect of agile organizational design

Platform/Server Specialist Taam

Projects that will increase revenue

Embarrassing Production level incidents being captured by the press

Seasonal marketing promotions

Standards compliance from the EA office

Corporate Banking Mobile Channels Cross functional Team

Legacy Product Systems Delivery Pool

Principles of Agile Team Design:• Favour cross functional teams

versus specialist teams• Majority of teams are business/customer facing

versus back-office/shared service• Work dependencies across

teams are minimized• Team rosters are stable enough to support storming, forming, norming required for high productivity• Team are largely self organizing, within specific

operational constraints• Teams have explicit interfaces defining how the team receives and delivers work

Organizations can take an incremental approach when adopting an agile mindset, using key metrics to drive behavior that change depending on progress along the agile adoption journey

Embracing Agility To Drive (And Measure) Explicit Business Outcomes Product KPIs (new customer acquisition,

ARPU, NPS, product quality, usage) Product Lifecycle (experience and process

effectiveness metrics, ex: acquisition and onboarding KPIs)

Time to learning (how fast can we experiment and test/learn whether new features and product offerings are achieving business expectation?)

Adopting Agility and Speed as a Culture

Are teams adopting some of the core agile practices (sprint planning, PBR, stand-ups, retro, sprint reviews, etc.) necessary to enable learning?

Are teams interacting with the business to prioritize and deliver new business value frequently?

Are teams defining “definitions of done” for there were, and how often do they achieve this “definition of done” ?

Is leadtime trending down, and throughput trending up over time?

Are teams respecting Work in Process limits and have a smooth CFD (no hockey stick) within iterations?

Is strategic work making it in the backlog effectively vs BAU work (ratios by priority)

How many improvement “experiments” are being rolled out by different teams?

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Institutionalizing Enterprise Operational Agility Velocity Variance (are we predictable) Acceptance Rate (are we getting to done) Failure Demand Rate (are we reducing rework and

defects) Impediments Resolution Time (are we resolving

blockers fast) Queue Size Ratio (are we managing a healthy

inventory and respecting the system) Lead time for Enterprisewide improvements

Matu

rity

Time

Key learnings and advice• Focus on teams, habits, and governance,

the SDLC is the easy part• Put employees in the driver seat of

change, focusing of change solutions that address specific team problems

• Your change plan, and vision for the future is going to be wrong! Deploy your organizational changes in small increments, so you can test and learn, refining your true north on the go

• Build capability in teams to self organize, and select methods that improve productivity in a measurable way

The Lean Change Method captures more of my perspective on how to kickstart agile in the enterprise

Download the book at https://leanpub.com/leanchangemethod