Category: agile

Time to stop talking about Transformation and Agile?

Economic and business uncertainty means many organisations are retrenching and protecting their operations and market offerings. Cost-cutting, head-count freezes and workforce reductions are likely levers organisations are focusing upon. This indelibly marks the climate within organisations, the concerns of leaders and anxieties of their staff.

There’s a lessening appetite for transformational work and once trending approaches such as Agile are no longer top of mind.

So, as change agents working with colleagues and clients, we need to be very careful using terms such as Transformation and Agile. Directly focusing on such activities and approaches are likely to have little currency and draw little attention.

Instead, when consulting and supporting colleagues and clients, try to pick up on their language and empathise with their position. In confidence, try to help them articulate their concerns.

Use techniques such as Agendashift’s 15-minute FOTO which helps them shift from obstacles to outcomes.

I’m not saying dismiss the values and principles of agility. I’m suggesting having these at the back of your mind, and play them into your client’s or colleague’s situation without hitting them over the head with Agile and Transformation. They’re likely already bruised by ill-fitting adoption of such approaches and initiatives.

Work with them to run safe-to-learn change experiments. Such experiments are likely to focus on protecting value with less – less funding and sadly potentially less colleagues.

So, unless they use them, stop starting conversations with terms such as Transformation and Agile. Instead, use their language, recognise their change anxiety, and co-discover approaches which enable their organisations to respond to a rapidly changing world.

The Cone-shaped Backlog

Here’s an approach I’ve found successful when helping teams ensure their backlog supports optionality, handles uncertainty and continuously adjusts so their goals and strategies are aligned to their vision.

A backlog should have these qualities

The backlog is made-up of backlog items. Each item represents a business goal, which when delivered by the team, will provide a beneficial outcome to the business and its customers/stakeholders.

Qualities of the backlog:

  • Easy to update by the product owner
  • Should be available to everyone in the business
  • Shows the backlog items for the next sprint
  • Conveys a vision of the future with a tangible path to the present
  • Reflects vagueness and options
    • If a distant backlog item is too vague to describe in words, consider drawing a picture, as shown in the photo below
  • Self-explanatory to anyone in the business

The cone-shaped

I often encourage teams to visualise the backlog in a cone-shape in this manner:

  • The neck of the cone shows the current sprint goals
  • The widest point of the cone shows the furthest goals which may be months or years from now.
  • The centre of the cone shows the goals for the intervening time periods. This area can be divided into sprints, months, quarters and half-year intervals.
Backlog visualised as a cone, like the cone-of-uncertainty

Reason for the cone-shape

  • It reflects the cone of uncertainty, where the further out the team considers, the less certain they are of the future environment.
  • The narrow neck of the cone reflects the fact the team can only sustainably deliver a small number of goals. Invariably there is more demand than the team can supply, so the team should gradually constrain the number of goals as the time nears the current sprint.
  • The further into the future, the more the team can consider a wide number of options. This optionality allows the team to consider many possibilities and scenarios without having to commit earlier than necessary. However, as time draws nearer, and as the cone gets narrower, the team will need to reduce the number of options based on the insights they have gathered.

Additional information which supports the backlog

As shown in the photo above, to enable continuous alignment across the business, there is additional information I advise teams to use:

  • Vision Statement: This is a short easy-to-understand statement which describes what the team intends to achieve. It’s written by the team, with their sponsor and stakeholders. The vision statement ensures alignment for the team with those they serve and with those whom the team may rely upon.
  • Strategies: These are the current set of approaches the team have reasonable confidence in that, if delivered successfully, will help fulfil the vision statement.
  • KPIs: These Key Performance Indicators are a small selection of measures which indicate whether the team’s strategies and sprint goals are achieving the team’s vision.
  • Epics start and end dates: Epics are goals which span more than one sprint. On the backlog, the likely start time of an epic is positioned with a blue post-it note; the likely end time is positioned with a pink post-it note.

Further Reading

Agile and Organisational Resilience – Part 2: Beyond Agile & Lean

This series of articles examines how organisations can create opportunity following a crisis. I will argue that as the world becomes more complex and undiscernable, how organisations prepare and deal with inevitable failure can give them a competitive advantage. So much so that intentional failure can provide more upside than the downside.

Many readers will be from the fields of Agile and Lean. Following on from my introduction to this series, this article will consider the maturity of these ways of working, but then put them to one-side until the end of this article series.

Why put them to one-side, especially considering I’m an Agile Coach? Well, to be frank, their current application is becoming commoditised. Their essence and original intent are being over-shadowed by large consultancies, large-scale change initiatives, sheep-dip training programmes and certification one-upmanship. Such organisations and initiatives often pay little more than lip-service to Agile’s and Lean’s simple yet powerful approach.

Using Geoffrey Moore’s Adoption Curve, there’s a lot to suggest Agile application is travelling across Early Majority. My opinion isn’t unique; Dave Snowden and many in the agile community recognise this trend.

Where would you place the maturity of agile and lean the adoption curve?

If we consider ourselves as change-agents, co-developing new emerging ways of working to help our clients and colleagues, we need to look beyond Agile and Lean – particularly in its current commodified application. This is my intent for this series of articles.

Another reason why I shan’t dwell on Agile and Lean is that I believe they have little application during an organisation’s crisis. However, later I will argue they play an important role once a crisis has been stabilised.

There’s a great deal of literature on how Agile and Lean deliver customer value at pace in a complex environment. I’m not going to repeat it here other than to say these approaches are particularly useful when dealing with known problems and opportunities. The challenge is that knowledge and understanding do not exist during shock events and crises that will inevitably engulf an organisation.

There’s a degree of overlap and complementarity between Scrum, Lean and Lean Startup, yet each has distinct emphasis.

Putting Agile and Lean to one-side, in my next article I’ll be returning to organisational resilience. I’ll be telling the story of Nokia, a company that has fallen out of favour yet has an impressive history of resilience.

 

A letter to a future client

Recently a potential client approached me about starting an engagement following some agile training I provided to their leadership team.

Although they’re very keen to get me on board, I wanted to check whether they were ready to work with me to uncover and deliver profound change to the organisation; change that is likely to make many leaders uncomfortable and sceptical.

Here’s what I wrote to them. I’ve anonymised identifying details.

From: Dean Latchana

Sent: 19 October 2018 11:26

To: xxx

Subject: Thoughts on joining [company]

Hi xxx,

Thank you for the offer for me to join [company].

In order for me to truly help the organisation, and know if I’d be a good fit, I’d like to understand the potential appetite for fairly profound organisational change.

It’s likely we’d need to review and change some fundamental expectations of how [company] is structured, how colleagues work together and how they’re led.

As we explored during the training, regardless of business ‘silos’, we need to consider creating more cross-functional small teams who sit together, potentially alongside their clients.

Regarding the clients, we may need to put more focus on collaboration, co-discover and joint experimentation to drive toward shared outcomes, and therefore put less emphasis on expected pre-defined deliverables.

We should also examine and change the traditional role of leaders. Changing them from defining pre-determined deliverables in a top-down manner. We probably need to coach leaders to embrace uncertainty in terms of how [company] competes, serves its clients and in terms of the natural uncertainty of innovation. Leadership probably need to switch to a governance structure which supports empowered delivery teams who continuously pivot or terminate initiatives as insight is gathered.

We need to consider how budgets are set. In a complex business environment, budgets probably shouldn’t be set on a 12-month cycle with pre-defined targets and resource allocations. To increase agility, innovation and competitiveness, we need to consider delivery teams having access to the “bank” where initiatives are frequently reviewed and financed on the strength of their latest insights and ROI.

We need to work with HR and Recruitment to ensure we have the right colleagues who have the right mindset to not only refine BAU operations, but also develop a mindset of exploration where there’s an appetite for ambiguity and delivering business outcomes at pace.

We probably need to visualise existing work at a portfolio level. An enterprise portfolio view will help us decide where to put emphasis, and quickly terminate any ongoing initiatives which aren’t delivering value now or in the future. At the portfolio level, we should consider creating a balanced scorecard that monitors existing ROI and potential ROI.

There’s plenty more we can explore and I’m saying all this without understanding [company] in great detail. However, what I’ve said gives a flavour of what we may need to change in order for [company] to operate effectively, serve its clients and compete.

Do you think my role will have the c-suite support for us to seriously consider these profound changes?

No doubt there’ll be hesitancy and some scepticism, however tactics are available for the leadership team to learn and adjust these new ways of working.

Best,
Dean

Talk: No longer distant cousins. Agile working with Finance

No longer distant cousins. Agile and Finance working together to ensure your organisation makes the right decisions with the right support.

The worlds of agile and finance often feel like distant cousins. Yet, considering the uncertainties of the business environment, these teams should be interlinked. Interlinked to enable organisations are making the right decisions, with the right people, at the right time, and with the right funds.

This talk will explore how to:

  • Start conversations that’ll create stronger links between agile and finance teams, and how to keep their shared journey on track.
  • Help create shorter budget cycles that’ll enable teams to strike the right balance between knowledge value and customer value
  • Ensure every discussion, choice and activity increases confidence that team goals will benefit the bottom-line and increase customer satisfaction
  • Help move your organisation from cost-based accounting to value-based outcome-driven accounting
  • Reduce centralised budgeting to allow greater freedom that enables the discovery of new value propositions
  • Help create a financial governance structure that supports teams in adapting to change over following a plan

Up your game by supporting your organisation in making better investment choices that support your teams, stakeholders and customers.

Talk Dates

Slides

Recording from a previous talk