Chapter 7. Your Agile Playbook
As we discussed at the very beginning of this book, it is ultimately up to you to understand why you are turning to Agile principles and values, how you are going to put those principles and values into practice, and what success might actually look like on the ground. This chapter is your opportunity to answer those questions for yourself and your team. If you are so inclined, you can mark your answers directly on these pages. If you would prefer to complete these steps digitally, you can find a template at http://bit.ly/AgileforEverybodyPlaybook.
Note that the answers to these questions will likely be very different depending on your role, your team, and your prior experience with Agile. The goal here is not for you to create a perfect, comprehensive, and risk-free plan; rather, it is for you to begin thinking through some of the questions that will ultimately lead your team down a meaningful and purposeful path. You can approach these questions yourself to clarify your thinking, or you can bring them to your team as a set of shared prompts for reflection. Even if you do not plan to write out your specific answers, I strongly suggest that you read through the questions in this chapter and think broadly about how their answers might affect your Agile journey.
Step 1: Setting Your Context
As we discussed in Chapter 2, having a frank and transparent conversation about the desired state of your organization—and what is currently stopping you from achieving that state—is critical before embarking upon any Agile journey. The answers we provide here will help guide both the principles we articulate in the next step and the steps we take to put those principles into practice. Note that in this exercise, we are explicitly looking at the “team” level, not the “organization” level. As we discussed in Chapter 6, the most successful real-world implementations of Agile often start with a single team, which then generates a “pull” throughout the broader organization.
My team is called the __________________ team, and our mandate is to:
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Example: “My team is called the Consumer Insights team, and our mandate is to conduct and commission research about our current and prospective users to generate actionable insights which we then share with our colleagues in marketing, sales, and product.”
What is the desired future state of our team?
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Example: “We want to feel more connected to other parts of the organization, and to know that our insights are directly driving new products, campaigns, and messages.”
What is the current state of our team?
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Example: “We love the work that we do, and we work well together. We have the support of leadership and great working relationships with our colleagues, but we are struggling to track and quantify the impact of our insights.”
Why do we believe that we have been unable to achieve the desired future state of our team?
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Example: “We are rarely in the room when decisions are actually being made by our colleagues in other parts of the organization. So it’s hard to know how our insights are informing those decisions, if at all.”
Step 2: Creating Your North Star
Now that you have mapped out the high-level changes you are seeking to enact for your team, it is time to craft a set of guiding Agile principles. As with the guiding principles we discussed in Chapters 3 through 6 of this book, your guiding principles should capture the ideas of customer centricity, collaboration, and planning for change, in the particular language that will resonate most for your team. Here, we will zoom out a bit to the organizational level, to make sure that these principles are aligned with the language that will be most accessible across teams and functions.
How do senior leaders in the organization currently talk about customer centricity (i.e., Amazon’s core value of “customer obsession”)?
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Example: “Our mission statement says that we ‘put our customers first,’ and our CMO recently said that consumer insights would be the engine powering the company’s growth.”
How do senior leaders in the organization currently talk about collaboration?
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Example: “Senior leaders do not talk very much about collaboration being a value in our organization, but we do hear a lot of grumbling about how busy everybody is with meetings.”
How do senior leaders in the organization currently talk about openness to change?
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Example: “Our CEO recently said that we need to ‘evolve or die’ as we face increasing pressure from well-funded competitors.”
Now, look for opportunities to weave this language into the way that you define your North Star of Agile principles. This is your chance to specialize the principles we have discussed throughout this book to better suit the specific goals of your team and organization. Doing so will help ensure that these principles seem relevant and applicable to your specific organizational context, and will help generate the “pull” needed to scale Agile across teams and functions.
A general Agile guiding principle for customer centricity is: “Agile means that we start with our customer.”
My team’s guiding principle for customer centricity is:
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Example: “We drive growth by bringing the consumer to life.”
A general Agile guiding principle for collaboration is: “Agile means that we collaborate early and often.”
My team’s guiding principle for collaboration is:
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Example: “We work closely with our colleagues to put consumers at the heart of every decision.”
A general Agile guiding principle for openness to change is: “Agile means that we plan for uncertainty.”
My team’s guiding principle for openness to change is:
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Example: “We learn and evolve as quickly as the consumers we serve.”
Of the three guiding principles I’ve defined, the most urgent one for my team is:
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Because:
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Example: “Collaboration, because we cannot guarantee that our insights will drive decisions if we are disconnected from the people making those decisions.”
Step 3: Committing to a First Step, Measuring Success
Finally, it is time for us to commit to one practice that we can try out to begin activating these principles. We begin with this single step because changing many things at the same time makes it difficult to track and measure which change is having which effect. Note that a single practice might speak to multiple Agile principles, like how working in sprints can reinforce both customer centricity and collaboration, and provide a concrete cadence for incorporating new information.
The first tactical step I would like to take toward putting my North Star into practice is:
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Example: “Holding time-boxed meetings to share the insights from our research with our colleagues, rather than sending those insights around via PowerPoint presentation.”
This puts my North Star into practice in the following ways:
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Example: “Strengthens our relationships with decision makers in other parts of the organization, and gives us a better opportunity to truly bring the consumer to life by sharing insights in person.”
As we did in Chapters 3 through 6, it is important for us to think about the actual changes that this practice might have on our day-to-day work.
A concrete, observable sign that this practice is helping us achieve our desired state would be:
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Example: “More communications (like emails and in-person questions) from our colleagues as they go about executing their respective work, to show that they are actually using the insights we share.”
A concrete, observable sign that this practice is not helping us achieve our desired state would be:
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Example: “If the people we invite to our time-boxed meetings stop attending or don’t pay attention.”
Step 4: Now It’s Up to You!
By this point, you should have a clear sense of why you want to change the way you work, one specific practice you’d like to implement toward changing how your team works, and what you anticipate might happen as a result. These are the essential elements you need to begin moving your team toward a better way of working…in theory. But in practice, it is up to you to make these changes a reality. The way you go about doing this will depend on your position, your role, and the specifics of your organization. The art of facilitating organizational change is a difficult one, and one that has been covered at length in excellent books like Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage and John Kotter’s Leading Change. But here are a few general things you can keep in mind when turning your playbook into a reality:
- Communicate your vision clearly and compellingly
An Agile journey will be most appealing to your colleagues if they have a general sense of where that journey is leading them. Work with your colleagues to paint a compelling picture of what the desired future state of your team might be, and let that picture guide you as you think about and measure the success of specific principles and practices.
- Be collaborative in your approach as well as your principles
Don’t let Agile be your thing alone; invite people in throughout the process, from setting your context through finding your North Star, through deciding on your first step and measuring its success. If you find yourself encountering resistance and uncertainty, go back to your vision for the future of the organization, and ask your colleagues how they would like their day-to-day work to be different.
- Set up time to reflect and refine
Before you actually implement any new practices, create the “safety valve” of an agreed-upon time to reflect, refine, and adjust course as needed. New ways of working are challenging and have unexpected consequences, and it is generally easier for people to commit to them when they know that they will have an opportunity to provide feedback and adjust course as needed. Consider scheduling an informal retrospective a few weeks after taking your first step toward implementing Agile practices so that your colleagues know that they will have a chance to participate and contribute.
- Be transparent and be brave
Finally, be transparent and upfront about what you are asking for and why. However we wind up articulating them, the underlying principles of Agile ask us to be more open, more communicative, and more generous with our colleagues and our customers. Bringing Agile to your team or organization, no matter how small or tightly scoped your first step might be, is an opportunity for you to fearlessly model this kind of transparency, even—or especially—if that transparency is not the norm.
With your Agile playbook in your hand and your Agile principles in your heart, you might be surprised at the impact you are able to have on your colleagues and your team—even before any Agile practices are adopted. Sometimes, just acknowledging that the way you currently work is not the way you want to work is enough to get people thinking and behaving differently.
Summary: Say Something, Do Something!
The questions contained in this chapter are designed to be a call to action, not an impediment to action. If any of them prove particularly challenging to answer, that is not a sign that you should give up, but rather a sign that you should talk to your teammates to better understand their thoughts and perspectives. The Agile value of collaboration reminds us that we are not alone, and that our colleagues are there to help us if we get stuck. And the Agile principle of planning for uncertainty reminds us that we are never really stuck at all; there are always opportunities for us to adjust course, which means that we can ultimately find our way regardless of where we started. We just need to take that first step.
Conclusion
Rediscovering the Human Heart of the Agile Movement
The Agile movement recently celebrated its 17th birthday. And, like most teenagers on the cusp of adulthood, it is going through some major revelations about its place in the world.
The 2018 VersionOne “State of Agile Report,” the world’s largest Agile survey, highlighted three major themes among respondents: “Organizational culture matters,” “Agile is expanding within the enterprise,” and “Customer satisfaction is of utmost importance.” The idea of Agile as a culture-changing movement that can unite diverse teams and functions around a shared vision of customer satisfaction is by no means a new thing—it is, in fact, at the very heart of why and how the Agile movement was founded in the first place.
So why are the issues of culture, collaboration, and customer centricity coming back to the forefront in 2018? Because many organizations that have ostensibly succeeded in implementing Agile practices and frameworks are still struggling to figure out these very issues. Declaring that a certain number of teams in your organization will be following the rules and rituals of an Agile methodology within a given period of time can result in the dutiful adoption of those rules and rituals. However, when these Agile practices are not synchronized with underlying Agile principles and values, the resulting tension can bring to the surface some much more challenging questions about our culture, our leaders, and how we serve our customers.
Therein lies the most deceptively powerful thing about Agile: even as teams and organizations slowly come to the realization that Agile practices are not a silver bullet for speed and success, the principles and values attached to those practices open up space for a different, deeper kind of change. The more that individuals and teams learn about these principles and values, the more they are able to find shared purpose in their work—just as the signers of the Agile Manifesto were able to find shared purpose in their respective approaches and methodologies.
If there is one hope I have for the future of Agile, it is that we continue to build upon our common values and principles, rather than relentlessly debating the tactics we use to put them into practice. The fact that so many businesses are interested in adopting Agile practices has given us an incredible opportunity to apply Agile principles and values to our day-to-day work. But if we want to escape the frameworks trap and truly transform our organizations, we must insist that Agile is, and always has been, about people and culture more than process and efficiency.
Starting with our principles and values gives us a way to approach Agile that truly is for everybody—not just software engineers, and not just people who are trained in a particular framework. It gives each and every person participating in Agile practices a chance to bring our own perspective and expertise to the table, to feel ownership over the way that we work, and to adjust course as our priorities, our teams, and our customers change. It does not give us any easy answers—but it leaves us with a lot of meaningful work we can do, together, starting right now.