These are not Werewolves; This is not a silver bullet.
I still find pockets in organisations that have absolutely no clue about agile. Sure they know that the teams in IT use this new-fangled thing and apparently they like it because reasons. This attitude does not seem to have shifted beyond the use of a buzzword.
And as an example, lets look at Dilbert; The internet’s favourite cynical engineer. Even in 10+ years we can still make satire of the low to no understanding of Agile by management boffins like The Boss.
Sadly, Dilbert’s boss is not the Ausnahme.
Even after the years of the proven success of Agile methods, and being a very popular employee hiring buzz word; how can the management layers of organisations still be so wilfully ignorant of the impacts of the frameworks they expound? Agile on the whole is still misunderstood beyond software development, where it’s now so ingrown that people are genuinely surprised when you don’t work iteratively. But go up a level and there slowness of change is palpable, if it exists at all. It’s a lethargic industrial hangover that is holding on for dear life outside of IT.
Companies start looking around for other approaches when the stench of covered up failures, high churn, and dead projects gets too strong to ignore. They are fishing for something as a means to fix some of the problems that are endemic within their growing, or large, organisational structures. And they want it yesterday. Because these issues are hurting today. This non-exhaustive list of possible reasons for stench is as follows:
- communication between teams
- communication between business units
- dysfunctional leadership
- information silos
- low trust and accountability
- poor quality in software
- assbackwards processes of no value to anyone
- lack of delegation
- products that suck
- monolithic everything
- slow time to market
- too many ladder climbing dudebros with mediocre people ability (lets call them High Performers — everyone else calls them A$$hole$)
- no f*&ing clue what customers want
..etc etc and variations/combinations of all of the above
See the thing is, these problems are not Werewolves; a single silver bullet will not kill them. They have specific causes and structures to support them.
Some of them are caused by managers holding on to what worked to propel them up the success ladders. Some are caused by having low skill in management nuance on the inception of the business. Overall companies know they need the change, but are unsure of how to achieve it. The impact of these werewolves is a slow descent into suckness, as states of disruption caused by them have specific and measurable impact on a companies ability to deliver.. well, anything.
So a few of the thought leaders/smart cookies find some beautifully designed quotes in slide-decks on organisational change, then read a slew of Gartner reports saying that agile succeeds where [insert-the-name-of-your-expensive-methodology-here] fails. Now it’s all so clear: we put a project manger in a team and call them a scrum master, make people stand around for task updates for 20 mins a day…. and hey presto our organisation is Agile™.
Problem solved… yes well..
In all seriousness; the quotestagrammable fluff posted online about benefits say a lot about the end result of a long and tortuous transformation to agile: The silver lining! The flexibility! The happy customers! The empowered staff! And precisely zero about how god-damn hard it is to do properly. And this does not help matters. In fact it makes it so so much worse.
However, it’s super important here to note that content posters and creators like Amy are 100% not wrong. This mindset change will eventually lead to an Agile Nirvana. In my abject cynicism though, my guess is that this transformation will likely be preceded by made up black-belts, referring to some of your teams as samurai or ninjas, saying Shuhari over and over again (without actually knowing what it means), or any one of the woowooasian ways of saying you’re reaching for enlightenment in regards to agility of business because if Toyota could do it…
What the motivational posters do not state is that the location of this mindset shift is absolutely critical for achieving those lofty goals, and solving those problems once and for all. Poorly implemented agile (Scrum — I’m looking DIRECTLY at you) doesn’t get the bonuses touted, and adds to the leading team and management myth of “we tried XYZ and it doesn’t work”.
Incredibly, doing something half-arsed will not get the advertised results.
When we sell the dream, we aren't selling the pain or where we truly need to start to make it effective. And herein lies one of the dirty little secrets about using any kind of agile — on implementation it means at all levels, business as you knew it is over… unless you like the taste of fail in the morning.
SPOILER ALERT: This shift needs to happen OUTSIDE the development teams. Teams can already feel the change after a couple of sprints of truly having ownership of their work.
To truly get the organisational benefits from these agile frameworks, it must be paired with driving a mindset change to do different and better, from mid management and above. Teams use some flavour of agile for delivery of software; LeSS, Scrum, Kanban, and hybrid dependent on team, size and need. Adaptation to change is a large pull for these, as is the loss of perceived pointless rigidity in process e.g. specifying everything up front in a huge doc. However this creates a misalignment between the traditional schools of thought around what “Management” e.g. scientific, bureaucratic, hierarchical etc expect as deliveries, milestones and reporting mechanisms.
The importance of BDUF and BRUP, contracts and business/information/communication silos, critical paths through work and PMBOK or PRINCE2 style projects, traffic lights and management by numbers are all artefacts of this old school of thought, and make the widespread success of adopting value based frameworks for development incredibly difficult. It also impacts HOW we manage teams and people used to these new value based pull systems. This lack of unified management agility affects product development, how we sell, how we message, how we interact, how we plan.. and how fast people like myself can change these problems.
My thought on the “why” of this, is that these artefacts are part of the “looking good and making sure I don’t get blamed” side of management/corporate culture.
And now some numbers:
The most respected State of Agile survey from 2016 still lists 46% of its 3,880 respondents stating that “Company philosophy or culture at odds with core agile values” as a key barrier to effectively adopt agile. 46%?
38% list “Lack of Management Support”. 42% state “General organizational resistance to change”, while 34% say “Ineffective management collaboration”. Not small numbers.
These are also concerns I hear repeatedly in my communication with my peers who battle werewolves every day.
But what does it all mean?
Pretending there isn’t a problem and doing something differently, amazingly, is not the best approach to solving it. It means that trying a (*cough*) project management framework expecting it to solve all your problems for no effort is a fools errand. And an expensive one at that… just ask anyone who’s tried SAP.
In terms of Implementing a framework to achieve solutions to the issues listed above, it means not cherry picking the things that you want because they fit with the fact that David is a waterfall program manager and lives/dies by Gantt charts. It means finding out why there is this pointless piece of red tape in a process and seeking to simplify through reduction. It means on hearing phrases like “this is broken, and is causing this-and-this problem” does not mean going on a crusade of blame. It means that you don’t just sell development effort with a timeline for achievement without involving developers in the estimation of that effort. And especially ESPECIALLY it means not getting annoyed if you’re not globally loved by said development teams for
a) your made up timelines
and
b) them not sticking to your made up timelines.
It means management stops expecting kowtowing and traffic light status reports, and start doing the gemba walk. It means rethinking how you’ve been doing everything from the foundation of a company up.
It means owning the mess you helped to create.
So I’ll say it again:
When we sell the dream, we aren’t selling the pain or where we truly need to start to make it effective.
How do we get there?
Well, to start with lets be honest.
Addicts around the world will tell you the first step to helping your addiction, is admitting you have a problem to begin with.
So, Management; we have a problem.
Everyone has a cushy little comfort zone of control. How hard this path to agility will be is directly proportionate to how tightly you hold onto the old ways.
We collectively know how frustrating it is that agile practices surface pretty much every dysfunction known to man(agement), and it’s difficult not to shoot the messengers for exposing the flaws in a “Looking Good” system. We know you’re doing your best with what you have; but times have changed. We need you to work smarter.. not get us to work harder.
It’s OK to admit that the system is broken, or dysfunctional, or sexist. This is a good first step. It takes a lot of courage to work beyond the scariness of change, but if you’ve come this far then likely you have people willing to help.
Here’s some harsh truth though:
If you don’t like change: stay away from this.
If you aren’t willing to change; stay away from this.
Don’t make upend everything just so you can use a buzzword.
If you’re ready to level up in the world, start creating real culture for your employees, products that delight, and fixing some broken bits along the way then start loving the taste of failure and dancing with Werewolves: it’s the only proof that you’re going in the right direction.
If you want the improvement, here are some ideas to get you started before you think about applying that Silver Bullet™:
Managment 3.0
Holacracy
Emergent Behaviours and Patterns
Systems Thinking
The Toyota Way
Agile Leadership Programme
Impact Mapping
LeSS Management Principles
Devops — Everything about it.
Let’s get started.
