How to Think about Value Based Agility
Your organisation has done some work around agile but are you doing value-based agility? You are, as they say, standing up agile teams. Your projects are being successfully descaled into smaller sprints. You have scrum masters and you have agile coaches. Is much really changing in your outputs?
The sad fact is many agile transformations or digital transformations do not deliver more value. In fact most fail to meet sponsor expectations. The same is true of platform transformations too.
There are many reasons for failing and thankfully there is one very good way to prime yourself for success. You have to think less about the mechanics of “agile” — the sprints, retrospectives and WIP limits — and more about where value comes from.
In the course of the next few posts I will explain some of the basics of value based agility but first I want to nail down the main principles. By and large agile practices allow you to do work faster. You still might be dragged out of shape by context switching demands from managers. But you will also have the benefit of improved communications. And if you do agile properly you will benefit from good goal setting. These are all important.
However, you can still be delivering stuff that customers or users don’t embrace. or you can still be working on long projects that miss their moment in the sun because they just take too long. They take too long, not because of work practices but because of the politics of your organisation — for example budget being pulled to make up a good quarter for the markets. Or executives who suddenly leave and take the momentum away with them.
Moving to value based agile helps get round some of these problems. The basic principles of value based agility is that you search for value the whole time. You work in multidisciplinary teams; you have the capability to look upstream at the inception of a new idea of potential product; and you have the skill in the team to decide if there is real value in doing the work.
Sounds easy. Easier said than done, which is why I’ll be going into the details later. Here is the first primer. It explains one facet of this CATE value wheel.
The principle is all important. Test for value before starting the work. Have systems that design for value. Know how to determine value early on. And keep testing.
