Random agile thoughts — Week 23, 2019
My random thoughts on challenges faced by an agile coach working with software development organizations
I usually blog about visual thinking and this is my first post ever dedicated to agile things. I have been inspired by persistency of my friend, colleage and a partner in crime Jakob Wolman who posts his observations quite regularly, you should check those.
My story is that I have been working as an agile coach for some years now, since as early as 2011, but somehow I never had courage to put my thoughts and field observations in open. I never considered them to be good enough, I was afraid they wer not professional or scientific enough.
But now I realized, I teach that people when I do visual thinking trainings, is that you should share early and often, regardless what you think about your work. This technique of sharing allows you to know what other people think about your thoughts, and that learning is powerful. Oh wait, isn’t that basically the essence of an agile mindset? Oh well, better late than never.
I am going to draw a lot as that is my way to communicate and I promise to do my best to keep the drawings and text concise and to the point, to respect your limited availabl etime.
Again, my major motivation is to document my thoughts, otherwise they get lost and forgotten as physical records in my beloved Moleskine notebooks. This way it will be easier for me to find them and reflect on them. I also hope there are people who could be interested to learn about them and share their opinions and engage in a dialog. In no way I think my thoughts are fundamental and it is not my intention to teach anyone.
So let’s go.
Random agile thought #1 — The untold power of calendars
Earlier this week my attention was attracted by another coach colleague Erik who said he was going to look into the “terrible situation with the middle managers calendar”. I did not understand his thought right away. But I started to think abou it and reflect more on that. Until the later in the week when I needed to have a quick chat with one of the influencial figures. I checked her calendar and it looked terrible for the week and a half ahead. The booked meetings made a lot of sense, but they left no spot in her calendar for an ad-hoc chat.
It dawned on me — we can talk about agility and flexibility of decisions as much as we can, but the reality is that managers and leaders do not have time for that until 1–2 weeks from now. Their calendars control their style, their lead time for a flexible thing to happen is 1–2 weeks!
The open question I have — what do we do about it? Do we ask them to decline everything and then not allow things on their calendar unless it falls into the agreed priorities for the week? Do we suggest them always keeping a half of the day closed for meetings so they have time to work? Or we do not allow creating bookings with a specific agenda so that there are only work slots on the calendar and people decide what to do there depending on the situation?
How do we break this vicious circle?!
Random agile thought #2 — The shadow economy of internal corporate politics
I got in two separate discussions with my colleagues representing two branches of the organization — one with the “business side” and another one with the IT side. Both were right and still they could not agree on what happens next. The business part demanded a realistic roadmap to use with stakeholders to secure more funding. IT did not care much because their development had enough funding to go and the extra demands just gave more overhead.
I thought that in a normal situation it would natural to respond the the opportunity to secure more funding. Why in this case there was no interest, no motivation to do that?
My thought was it is about other driving factors that control IT function behavior — they are tracked on people productivity, following the IT committed roadmaps. Those are the primary measures of their success. The other considerations are just annoyance.
You could say that the silo KPIs create a shadow economy inside of the organization that prevents the normal one, where you want to prioritize the value for your customer above the rest, subdue the rest of decisions to this line of thought.
I find this a very powerful hindrance to achieving the agile mindset.
Random agile thought #3 — People are the new currency
Somewhat related to the previous thought, maybe extending it to a different dimension. Again, back to this Business to IT equation in big organizations. Business parts are usually staffed with less people. Those are important and smart players. But they alone usually are not capable to produce the valuable product or a service to the organization’s customers. IT on the other hand have many more people, people who are directly involved into creating software products and services used by the end customers. They could potentially do things alone, unsupported by the Business people.
My third observation from the week is that this factor is used like a matter of influence in the internal politics that regulate the Business to IT relationship. The fact that IT has those people drive their agenda quite successfully. This allows them to override budgeting conversations that Business is trying to use to leverage their decision making.
Does that mean that people is the true internal currency for the big organizations? Does everyone agree to that? Does everyone realize that? This model alone could help a great deal shaping the culture transformation program, for example, by allocating IT specialists into the business units to give them enough currency for leveraging the internal dialogs.
Your thoughts?
