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Agile leadership

Agile can be used as a leadership and management tool to support and maintain successful organisations faced with constant change in an ever-complex and unforgiving global economy.

The direction of a business is governed by its capacity and capabilities. The role of a leadership within a business is to provide the business with a shared sense of purpose through clear goals and objectives that provide the team with clear direction for the long and short term.

• Agile methods direct and manage business activities to ensure that there are sufficient resources and capacity to attract and fulfil demand for its business services in a profitable and sustainable way.
• Good leadership and decision making should include being informed by the people working within the business. Performance metrics of the business should inform the business strategy, direction and any change and growth plans.
• Agile provides a tool to help communication work both ways within the organisation. It provides tools to enable key information to be fed back to management and leadership teams, so that they can reflect and learn from it, in order to inform the future direction.

Using the GROW coaching model described in Section 8 (see Figure 8.1), business leaders can work collaboratively to establish goals and objectives with their teams.

• Agile establishes a shared language and understanding across the business, which helps to ensure key messages are communicated and understood. Key values and beliefs are established and shared to focus on specific objectives and to encourage innovation and collaboration.
• Agile helps to break down barriers and provides a way of working that allows all layers of an organisation to see work in progress at various levels and how they are inter related.
  

  Figure 28.1 Balancing running and growing

• Agile is a way of working that empowers teams and individuals with the freedom to work and be clear about their role and responsibilities, enabling them to see how their work contributes to the overall goal, and where dependencies lie.

Directing change

Leaders and managers are challenged to balance running an efficient and effective business with growing and scaling the business through change and improvement (see Figure 28.1).

As a business grows, the workings of the business must grow and evolve to manage increasing volumes of workload most efficiently. Agile provides an approach and structure to manage a busy team and help the team to:

• Be responsive to visual cues and flags that agile boards highlight.
• Recognise where change is needed, due to blocks, distractions or barriers to performance or development.
• Evidence the need for change and improvement through metrics and measures.
• Prioritise and control the amount of change to balance against existing workload.
• Identify trends and events that affect the business.
• Ensure quality is maintained by making certain that teams are not over-committing, by measuring and controlling workload.

Breaking down barriers

• Poor communication and misunderstanding are key reasons for friction and disconnect between teams. As a communication management tool, agile provides a simple and practical way for teams to communicate and share their work across the business.
• Agile tools and materials are tactile and visual. This means they are on display and not hidden away in spreadsheets and planning documents.
• Agile enables communication to flow both up and down through the business to provide clarity and transparency. Agile helps to break down the barriers of hierarchy within a business by providing a shared space where leaders and managers can communicate and understand the reality of day-to-day working within the business and what is going on.

Strategic roadmap

Businesses first and foremost provide products and services, and these need to evolve constantly in order to keep pace with today’s changing and developing markets. A strategic roadmap (a tool adapted from Jeff Brantley’s keynote speech at the Agile on Beach Conference 2012 - see Brantley (2012)) helps to guide direction and balance running the business with changing and growing the business.

A roadmap (see Figure 28.2) helps to show the way forward for the growth and development of the business and how this breaks down into chunks of work. The roadmap shows, at a high level, the goals and milestones for the expected development of the business. It shows the multiple workflows of the products, services and resources planned for the current period and the following two to three periods, which may be quarterly, monthly or weekly, depending on the pace, type and current status of business.

While agile sprint boards and lean pipelines are used by individuals and teams to manage and visualise short-term work in progress, a strategic business roadmap is valuable to forecast activities at a high level over the medium term, to align teams and activities being undertaken across the business.

The roadmap links into agile dashboards that provide details on the current work in progress, and maps the future work into the backlog of work to be actioned during later sprints of work.

Figure 28.2 Example of a business roadmap

By mapping work onto a roadmap at a higher level, gaps can be identified where slack is available to schedule growth and projects at optimum times, show gaps where new business could be gained, or where work can be taken from busier periods and moved to quieter ones.

• Goals/milestones could show the launch of new products, key project dates, delivery dates or objectives of the business over a rolling time period.
• Key areas of business activity are shown on the board: for example research and development may show new products in development, while marketing may show key marketing campaigns to promote these new products, and production and delivery may show the anticipated production of the new product.
• Significant changes and variations to resources and infrastructure are shown on the roadmap to raise awareness and help to ensure that these changes align well with business activities. For example, this could be a new systems implementation, recruitment of new personnel or an office move.
• Trends and events show key dates and times for the business, trade shows, peak season, trips, holiday and other events that affect the capacity or capability of the team.

Information on the roadmap can be differentiated with colours and labelling to help show areas of activity. It should be updated regularly by the management team and available to teams to view at any time.

A roadmap helps teams to identify dependencies and see what other teams are doing. Raising the awareness of cross-team dependencies can help form links and collaborative activity between the teams to achieve the best flow and find ways to improve, streamline and scale.

This type of roadmap gives a high-level view of the activity of the team over a period of time. It also helps to show where capacity, such as people and resources, will be stretched during busy periods, and underutilised at other, quieter times. This is due often to seasonal or market trends: for example, a seaside hotel will be at maximum capacity during the summer months, but verge on empty during January, due to the nature of when people generally choose to take holidays by the sea.

The benefit of a visual roadmap is that all teams can see how their work fits into the wider business context. It allows key information to be displayed and provides a view of the routes to be taken to fulfil business goals and guide direction.