How can your company forge its own path to Business Agility?
My current passion is Business Agility. I believe wholeheartedly that this is where the progression of agile principles lead naturally. Though it’s no easy path to success. As an industry, we are honestly still struggling with executing the basics of being agile and forming self-managing, long-standing teams. Younger, smaller companies perhaps have an advantage, building agile principles into the way they work from the start. The Lean Startup is a common theme and I love that. But the older, established and more set-in-your-ways the culture of the company is makes it monumentally harder to shift the mindset to being agile. Have you ever tried to list the specific reasons why that is true? I’ll see if I can help itemize the places to focus on building agility and some of the approaches you might consider.
I’ve seen it enough times to know that no matter what the company culture, it is 100% possible to build a healthy agile team mindset from the bottom-up. You might start with one team, working on one product, managing their own backlog. It’s almost always possible to get that team what they need, including the people with all of the necessary skills, a dedicated product owner, a scrum master or agile lead, and a delivery manager all working toward the goals set by a business sponsor. This is how many agile cultures start, as an experiment with middle management support.
So, if my premise is true, that anyone can get started and build the foundation of an agile culture, the real question is what comes next? What does a company need to do in order to build a pervasive agile culture everywhere in technology in full cooperation with the greater business (finance, marketing, sales, support, HR, lines of business, etc.)
As you might suspect, the answer is “it depends”. But what approach makes sense anywhere? Can we put together some sort of methodology or process that would work at any company? I believe this is what the business agility thought leaders in our industry have been working on in recent years. There is a lot to learn from the Business Agility Institute, Agility Health and the Enterprise Business Agility Strategist certification as well as the family of Business Agility certifications from ICAgile.
If we look logically at what these business agility experts suggest, some themes evolve.
- Leadership and Organization. There must be leadership support, from the top down. Company vision, mission and objectives are more deliberately handed down and aligned throughout the layers of leadership in every business silo.
- Customer Value Prioritization. The company must create a customer-driven top-down set of priorities that aligns with the vision, mission and objectives. This can be accomplished from a lean business intake perspective for new initiatives; a product management vs. projects perspective; or a finer-grained financial budgeting and planning perspective. The goal is to create an enterprise portfolio and manage the work collectively that the company is focused on. This is often accomplished by starting with a technology portfolio first, and evolving into multiple portfolios in the business before they can all be aligned into one.
- Persistent Culture and Communication. In order for new cultural norms to be established, there needs to be habits, regular communication and reminders of the new focus. An Agile Community of Practice can help break down silos and bring people together for a common purpose. Change agents and process advocates are necessary to remind people at the team and team of teams levels of the renewed focus as well.
- Product Market Fit Mentality. Once a company has a customer-centric perspective, they must establish the habits that build the tightest feedback loops that are reasonable to deliver the right things to their customers, reducing risk through shorter iterations. This is a culture of experimentation that considers requirements more like hypotheses, to be confirmed before making larger investments in any idea before it’s been validated.
In the end, when a company has business agility, there is tremendous alignment between all facets of the business and all divisions are considered part of the business. Technology is an enabler, not a cost center. The company has aligned all divisions on a common set of goals and objectives. These goals are prioritized based on direct and indirect customer-focused value that reflects the company vision and what they do for their customers.
High-level transformation approaches are well and good, but they do not help provide step by step instructions on how to get there. If we know what business agility should be when we’re done and we know how to start with at least one team being agile, what does it look like in the middle of the transformation? Given my experience, I can speculate on some common themes that I’ve seen companies take. The reality is transformations are messy. Multiple approaches will likely be used in parallel. Some will take years, some will fail, stop and restart. See if any of these approaches make sense to you and your organization:
- Portfolio Transparency. Technology portfolios are often first to evolve. Does your CTO or CIO know exactly how many longstanding teams you have and what products, projects or programs they’re working on? Do you have roadmaps for each initiative? Marketing, HR and other divisions can easily follow suit and build their own portfolios to help them prioritize their efforts. Works best when corporate priorities are passed down and consistently communicated. Do not build separate Product and Technology portfolios because that’s a strong anti-pattern to progress.
- Product Management. Do you have a centralized product management function that is responsible for the customer’s point-of-view driving priorities for the organization? Do product managers set the vision for the products they manage? Do product owners reside full time alongside their delivery teams? Is there a strong voice in your organization advocating for the prominence of products over projects where applicable (i.e. #noprojects)?
- PMO Evolution. In some organizations, the PMO is a strong advocate for traditional project management and risk management (i.e. waterfall) that can be a strong opposing force to agile initiatives. Progressive organizations have learned to evolve their PMO to be a central point of decision making and leadership, collaborating with both Product and Technology organizations to contribute input into the greater prioritization process, assign delivery managers, business advocates and analysts to teams. The Project Management Office is a fine place for the single, collective portfolio for a company to end up, managing the involvement and oversight of all divisions across initiatives.
- Financial Focus. Annual budgeting is a huge hurdle for any organization striving to be more agile. Public companies and regulated industries will find it even harder to break out of this anti-pattern. The truth of today’s business though is that no one can predict exactly what they’ll be spending their money on 3 or 4 quarters from now. To start making progress here, consider quarterly budgeting true-ups or levels of abstraction that do not directly relate budgeting numbers to specific projects or programs. Value Stream funding is an excellent stepping stone as well (i.e. Do we want to keep these 4 teams working on this product next quarter or should we divert them to a different priority?) Financial team members should strongly consider reading Beyond Budgeting to find a specific approach to implement that will work for them.
- Parallel Progress. If Technology matures its agile culture to deliver products in a portfolio while Marketing refocuses its priorities with its own portfolio and HR learns to adapt its processes (including performance management) to the dynamic needs of the organization all at the same time, it may feel like a new layer of silos, but it’s a great step towards business agility if there is some level of communication and agreement about corporate priorities in each. Consider each division of an organization implementing their own separate portfolio to prioritize their initiatives (according to the customer-driven top-down vision, mission and goals) to be similar to individual product teams managing their own backlogs. The final step to create one ultimate portfolio might be having an Agile PMO, for example, to help connect and drive additional lean principles, collaboration and coordination across the initiatives and portfolios that span the divisions.
- Cross-functional Teams. For companies that have made great progress maturing their scaled agile approach for larger products and programs over teams of teams, there may be a path forward to extend the self-managing team principles at scale. Instead of the silo-of-portfolios example above, consider each large program having dedicated involvement from their related functions. A large technology product will impact marketing, sales, support, finance and HR; so, put dedicated individuals on the team. Have them sit with the technology team to be tightly coupled and working in lockstep. It’s the layers of separation, distance and unfamiliarity that creates disfunction in larger organizations. Consider the Riot Games agile approach, where everyone is on a product team.
- Leadership and/or New Blood. One thing must be admitted: you cannot achieve higher levels of business agility without executive and senior leadership support. Most experienced leaders, however, are open to coaching when approached in the right way. There is great logic and greater power in using lean language instead of agile jargon with senior leaders. Finding waste, creating alignment, setting vision and communicating direction are all essential ingredients that are the exact responsibilities of those senior leaders. And these align with our agile mission perfectly. But should you fail in those approaches, or do not have someone who can effectively communicate these messages to senior leadership, you may not have any options. In these circumstances, your efforts to become more agile will just only go so far until there are changes in leadership.
- External Motivation and Competition. Some organizations don’t get organized quickly enough until there is a competitive threat that requires them to get focused. Business as usual with annual product planning and longterm roadmaps works for incumbent companies that don’t need to react quickly to emerging market factors. But eventually, a competitive threat will force that company to act. In order to innovate quickly, thwart a competitor, or enter a new market quickly, a large organization may turn to agile processes to solve that problem. A leader might rally their company in an all-hands meeting to set the focus: tight iterations, deliberate customer focus, short feedback loops, strong product management, and responsive technology delivery teams working to address the market need. Agile advocates should leverage this situation for longer, sustainable change, new habits and behaviors.
So, what will you do in your organization? Which of the above approaches have the best chance for success? What other ideas do you have that can help move your organization toward business agility? Please share your ideas!
About the Author: Brian Link is the author of AgileMisconceptions.com (also available on Amazon) and the owner of Practical Agilist, LLC. Brian provides leadership and coaching services as an Agile Coach at LeanDog. Follow Brian on Twitter @blinkdaddy or LinkedIn, and subscribe to his newsletter.
