CHAPTER 7: THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

As I said at the beginning of this book, Agile is about change; changing how you think, changing how you work, and changing the way you interact. Agile Business Management provides the guiding philosophy and supporting processes to help catalyse this change within your organisation. How you apply this is between you, your Teams, and your Customers.

Whatever your ultimate goals, an Agile organisation emphasises adaptability and Customer interaction, while remaining aligned to the four core Agile values.

1 We value individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

2  We value [completed Customer Requirements]over comprehensive documentation.

3  We value customer collaboration over contract negotiation.

4  We value responding to change over following a plan.

These values form the foundation, and Agile Business Management provides the framework, to build your organisation. You need to take that foundation and framework, and build the rest.

In these last few pages, let’s look at the first steps that you may take as part of an Agile Business Management transformation. I must caveat that this is an example transformation. Your organisational culture, strengths, weaknesses, and priorities, will drive the steps that you take. For instance, I have worked with several Asian organisations where title, and rank, was very important to staff. During these transformations, we retained much of the existing structure and related titles, while mapping these to Agile responsibilities.

A final thought before we drill into the example transformation. Out of all the techniques, processes and philosophies in Agile, never underestimate the importance of common sense.

Pre-Agile Learning Agile

Where do you start with something as complex as an organisational transformation? I’d recommend you start with a vision, and a short business case, defining the expected end state, and core benefits you hope to achieve. Remember that this is Agile, and your vision and goal, can, and will, change throughout the life of the transformation. Defining outcomes and benefits is only half the story, you also need to define the organisational maturity measures that you will use to validate progress and benefits realisation.

If you haven’t done so already, you need to engage with the rest of your organisation. Workshops, and one-on-one meetings with Teams, are a good way to make sure everyone understands the new values of the organisation. This engagement process should encourage a culture of transparency, and drive the change from a process-driven organisation, to a relationship-driven organisation.

Throughout this engagement, you also need to ensure that new staff understand the Agile corporate goals. This stage of the transformation programme is the perfect opportunity to develop an Agile recruitment policy, to ensure new employees understand the Agile approach, and will fit into the new organisational culture.

Next, is to put in place the mechanism to review, and drive, iterative change throughout the organisation – the Retrospective workshop. This is also a good time to introduce Agile Meeting processes, to facilitate efficient Retrospectives, workshops, and other internal business meetings.

With the Retrospectives in place, it becomes easier to transition to smaller, and more frequent, deliverables. You can also begin to design, and map, workflow processes for some of your Teams and Departments, and transition them to Continuous, or Incremental, Delivery processes. Some Teams will have complex workflow and delivery processes, and you can transition these in at a later stage. Finally, you can’t have Continuous or Incremental Delivery without appropriate planning and design, so you also need to introduce Agile planning sessions.

You should begin to put in place Kanban Boards, to track, and visualise, and control the workflow of those Teams that you have transitioned. You can create an initial, best guess, WIP limit, and optimise it later. Though it may be difficult for your Teams, starting with low WIP limits will help identify bottlenecks, and other constraints.

Towards the end of this initial transformation phase, you will want to begin the organisational restructure process. It will take a long time to define the areas of responsibility, and the boundaries between departments, and even longer to engage all of the staff in the restructure process. Begin the process of restructuring by sharing resources and skills within the existing structure, to create functional Cross-Functional Teams.

Alongside each of these process, value and mindset, changes, is the continuous, and targeted, coaching of managers, staff, and Customers alike. Managers need to learn new ways of engaging with their Teams, as well as understanding the new organisational performance measures. Departmental staff need appropriate training, to ensure a smooth transition to their new processes and responsibilities. Finally, Customers, both internal and external, need to learn how their role and responsibilities will change under the new management processes.

Early Agile Agile management

Depending on the size of your organisation, the previous stage of this example transformation could take upwards of 12 months. However, once your organisation has settled into simple, Agile processes, and there is an overall understanding of the values, and goals of Agile, across all staff and Customers, we can begin to push the transformation to the next stage.

In this stage, we can begin to invest in overarching Agile governance. Introducing Agile executive governance bodies, such as the investment committee, information management committee, or project steering committees, will bring strong governance to the organisation, in line with core Agile principles. With Agile governance structures in place, create Agile KPIs, to measure the performance of managers and executives against the Agile goals of the organisation.

It also makes sense to transition existing management processes to Agile, such as financial management, or business case policies. Establish new delegation and contingency rules to provide a level of autonomy at a Team level. Allow decisions based on short, concise, business cases, with the understanding that things will change. Finally, if possible, change the organisation’s budgeting process to an iterative model, to take advantage of emerging opportunities.

Required, governance processes, should be integrated into the new Agile processes. Depending on your industry, or Customer demands, processes, such as CMMI, ISO20000, or ISO38500, can co-exist with Agile Business Management. Of course, as with all business transformations, apply common sense to your decisions.

As the organisational restructure continues, this is a good opportunity to introduce Self-Organising Teams, while ensuring that existing business functions continue to operate.

I would usually take this opportunity to undertake an external Customer audit. This audit would review the trust levels, relationships, and interaction between each Customer and the organisation. From here, I would begin to transition each Customer, starting with the closest relationships, to take on their new Agile responsibilities. This includes building, and maintaining, the Requirement Backlog, working closely with the Team during each stage of delivery, and participating in Team planning and review meetings.

As Teams and their Customers begin to integrate, I would supplement their existing training with communications training. Given how quickly Requirements can change, communication skills become critically important. Misunderstandings can quickly spiral out of control, and can break the bond between the Team and Customer, if they aren’t identified, and resolved, early.

There needs to be an ongoing refinement of the processes and strategies implemented during the first stage. Through the Retrospectives, each Team should review their processes to identify bottlenecks, constraints and optimisations. This should lead to adjustments in workflow states, processes, and WIP Limits, as well as improvements to Team communication, and collaboration with their Customers. If Teams haven’t already implemented them, they should begin to measure, and visualise, progress against plans, with burndown charts, cumulative flow diagrams, and run charts, as appropriate.

Finally, once you have good management, you can begin to investigate supporting tools, to simplify many of your new Agile processes. Investing in workflow (Kanban) and Backlog management tools, can simplify the administration, and visualisation, of Customer Requirements, while communication tools, such as video conferencing systems, can improve overall interaction across multiple sites and Teams.

Agile practitioners Continuous improvement

With good Agile management in place, we can begin the final stage of our example Agile transformation; reinforcing cultural change, and driving continuous process improvement across the organisation.

You should have completed the formal organisational restructure at this point. The design of departments, and business functions, should be around the efficient delivery of Customer Requirements. There will almost certainly be further changes to meet evolving organisational needs, but you should have a lean management hierarchy, with delegated authority to cross-functional and empowered Teams. As with all restructures, this may lead to redundancies, if positions become surplus to requirements, or people are unwilling, or unable, to adapt to their new roles. However, given the transparent nature of Agile, the rationale behind the redundancies should be evident to all staff.

Self-organising Teams need to have an awareness of the skills available within the organisation. Ideally, Teams should achieve this through open communication between themselves, but, for very large organisations, you may undertake a formal skills audit. The organisational structure should include Centres of Excellence (or Competency Centres), to facilitate the development, and management, of specific organisational skills.

If not already addressed, review, and formalise, quality control and quality assurance processes within each Department, business function and Team. Where possible, encourage Teams to utilise Test-Driven Work, by defining quality control measures and tests upfront, prior to beginning any work.

Teams should continuously review, and refine, their workflow processes, to resolve any new bottlenecks and constraints. Teams should also begin to take on new responsibilities for risk management, and corporate strategy.

With an understanding of their workflow, Teams can begin to utilise formal estimation techniques, to improve their Requirement (or Iteration) planning. Accompany estimates with appropriate measures, visualisation, and regular reviews, to improve the overall accuracy of the process. However, as with the introduction of all new processes, measure the performance of the Team, to ensure that the new process actually produces a net positive impact.

Finally, you can begin to investigate the specific benefits to your organisation of some of the more controversial Agile, and Agile Business Management techniques, such as Pair Work, monthly budgeting, and time-based estimation.

Remember that this is a process of continuous improvement, that there is no end. You don’t have a Gantt chart on your wall showing when your Agile transformation is complete. Where there is benefit, and the value of that benefit outweighs the cost, there is change, and there is Agile.

The next step in the Agile journey is yours to take.