What is Value-Based Agile?
Bringing value to business agility
The agile manifesto says that agile practices should prioritise value. But do they? And if not, what can we do about it?
In our experience, most companies have run into difficulties on the road to agile. These difficulties stem from four main sources:
- They have used large consultancies to design and implement agility, and those consultancies draw on models that are not really models at all (like the Spotify Model!).
- They have not addressed the relationship between different departments and the IT group. This raises a complex set of challenges that need to be addressed before you can be agile.
- Agility has not been value-centred. The main impetus has been to increase “release velocity” or in other words to deliver more software features more quickly. This sounds good but it can often mean delivering work of low value, quickly.
- Finally, agility has been achieved in one area (usually IT) and that is enough for executives to tell a good story, which generally means that the actual process of becoming agile is stalled and persists in silos rather than spreading to the whole company.
Though value is referenced in the agile manifesto, it is generally perceived as a waste reduction and efficiency mantra with few real tools to ensure that work adds as much value as possible.
Value is a behaviour
However, it is imperative that we start to think of value as a core behaviour and a core objective in work.
Typically, today the core behaviour is “follow the rules”, “defend my position or budget” or “fulfil a role”.
In contrast, in Flow, we talk about value seeing behaviour and multidisciplinary people for multidisciplinary teams (people who think outside their roles).
We are also keen on the value of good social interaction as the backdrop for good decision making.
After all, collaboration is another word for good interaction. And we ask for leaders to redefine their purpose so that they become valuable outside of the hierarchy. These are all part of value-based agility.
Good practitioners of agile are already practicing it. They have good release velocity but are also developing features that customers really want, a good definition of work of value.
Organisational structure v flow of work
To get to these gains, you need to think about the concept of value-based agility. In most organisations there is a conflict between work as a vertically organised control system — the hierarchy or “org chart” — and work as a horizontal flow of interconnected (preferably continuous) activities.
The hierarchy controls resource allocation and receives reports but the value is added “in the flow”. However, the hierarchical controls often interrupt the flow of work, disrupting the process of creating value.
Our purpose in developing concepts like value-based agility is to transfer the benefits of hierarchy (consistency, certainty, resource management) to the development of value in the flow.
So what is value-based agility?
It is first of all a recognition that the environment of the modern enterprise has changed dramatically in recent years. And will continue to change.
In the diagram above you see four ways in which markets, enterprises, and behaviours are changing.
Value-based agility applies to the whole enterprise so it needs to be as relevant to marketers as developers, finance and logistics.
In Flow, the framework for value-based agility, our goal is the create the metrics that track performance on these four parameters. If an organisation aims to increase value throughout the flow of work then it will be monitoring its progress on these axes.
It will, for example, be developing holistic services that embrace more of the customer’s life. It will be oriented towards micro-scale (in markets, transactions, delivery). It will have strong customer segmentations that drive innovation. And it will be using ecosystems to scale its activity.
As yet there is no shorthand for value-based agility. It is a rethink of the way we do agile. More to come….
Haydn Shaughnessy
Fin Goulding
