We’re Not Done Being Agile Yet!
Our corner of the tech industry that includes agile coaching and related services is down 70%. If the number isn’t that high, it certainly feels like it. So many facts in this insightful article explain the decline in great detail. Here’s just one chart of many that summarizes the impact. (Read “I Spent 8 Weeks Researching the 2024 Tech Job Market” by Colin Lernell)
There’s a lot of green banners out there on profiles on LinkedIn. And those are just the brave souls who publicly admit they are looking for new work. (I’ve flip flopped. Had it on for a while, trying it off again to see if it matters.)
Maybe it’s inflation and interest rates, fear of recession, or the fact it’s an election year. Maybe “agile has won” and the idea of agile as a role is becoming more of a skill that everyone needs to have.
But agile is not dead.
Do you know many large companies that have perfectly set up their company to be agile through and through? No, it’s more likely that big companies succeeded in making a few teams agile (or 100s of teams), then maybe trained everyone in the basics and even trained up their Scrum Masters and Product Managers. But it’s very rare for an organization, I think, to do the more important things that would drive the significant changes that improve business agility.
What do big companies fail to do in their transformations?
- Prepare the executives in how their jobs change. They don’t need to know everything, but they should definitely expect to interact differently with their directs and understand the modern ways of working enough to know the old ways of thinking don’t work anymore.
- Start with a vision and strategy reset. Are you really aligned and confident in your Product strategy? Which products do your customers love? Which ones are most profitable? What are your value streams? Are you stretching the company too thin by trying to do more than what your core offerings allow? Companies have WIP limits too!
- Create transparent alignment from corporate strategy to divisional or departmental strategies and directly inspire the teams of teams to do the work that matters most. The vision and strategy should be tightly described in Corporate OKRs and updated quarterly so that the divisions and teams can re-align their short term goals in their own OKRs. Everyone should know why they do the work they do, which customers the work impacts, and how they will know it’s working.
- Simplify the organizational structure of the teams and their leaders to more closely align with the product strategy. Has anyone done a lean waste analysis of how long it takes products to be released when multiple teams are involved? Do not be afraid to rearrange teams and eliminate dependencies if you are still seeing delays in product deliveries or have low customer satisfaction.
- Train the middle managers. It takes more than servant leadership skills to adequately support teams and create the space and the right environment for innovation. Agile teams deserve to have bosses and bosses’ bosses that understand how they work, what they need, how to eliminate impediments, and have the foresight and systems thinking skills to see and eliminate challenges before the teams run into them.
So, you’ve laid off some coaches and scrum masters, now what?
I know companies still need help improving how they work. I’m pretty sure just about any team, if they really scrutinized and inspected themselves, would find there are a number of areas in which they could improve their process, eliminate waste, escalate issues more quickly, hold themselves accountable more often, cross-train and share skills more fluidly, actually measure their ability to deliver value and understand the impact of their work through talking to real customers… and a long list of other things.
However, some of the people who act as catalysts in that endeavor are no longer around or are stretched too thin. And for whatever reason, there is a lack of headcount right now in the second half of 2024 to fill those gaps with new hires or contractors.
Well, I have an obvious solution. And I’m not the only one providing this kind of service. The answer may be in hiring experienced coaches and consultants to execute short-term, high-impact engagements. Pick your most important problems and hire someone to help solve it in a month or two. What I know about big companies is that they may not have headcount but they don’t completely halt spending on expenses.
There’s so many things you could accomplish in a month or two
As a business consultant (and agile coach who’s led tech teams as a CTO) there’s a lot we could accomplish together very quickly. Whether it’s one particular team or a team of teams finding better ways to collaborate and deliver consistently. Or helping to create strategy alignment between leadership and teams through properly building and aligning OKRs to inspire meaningful work. Most well-rounded coaches can help do these things. And if you define scope reasonably, progress can be made quickly.
I’ve selected a few things I do and put them in a simple proposal document. If you’re curious, please reach out and let’s talk. I’m always interested to listen and share honestly my suggestions in a free consultation. See below.
Schedule a free consultation to discuss a short-term high-impact engagement.
No thanks, what else you got so I can help myself instead?
I am really passionate about agile and love helping people. This is why I’ve created two other specific offerings. As an Agile Coach, after really analyzing what I do, I found there are 24 simple topics that I tend to focus on to help teams learn what it means to become more agile. The topics are based on my own definition of the Agile Mindset. (Read this article, “What is the Agile Mindset?”, for the details I cover spanning 7 different cultures and mindsets that I think are critical to understand and appreciate the Agile Mindset)
The Practical Agilist Guidebook
Just last week I published my book after almost year of mostly not working (and I needed that time to do it!) This book is meant to be read in whatever order is helpful; a guidebook for you to discover more information about the topics you think you need to improve. Which is exactly how I’d operate as your Agile Coach. What do you need to work on?
The 24 topics serve as chapters. Each of them explains why the topic is important and what you should understand to embody the behaviors of a team with a high level of maturity.
There are also subsections in each topic to call out specific tips for a Scrum Master and for an agile team leader so they know what else they can do to help create the right environment and how best to support a team working on this topic.
Each topic also has a list of AI prompts so the reader can explore further on their own with ChatGPT or another LLM to dig deeper.
Every topic is broken down into four specific behaviors that a team will recognize. See the table below. I describe a simple scale of maturity for each of those behaviors. What does it look like to not have Psychological Safety, for example? And what would it look like if you had a high level of maturity or somewhere in the middle?
And lastly, my favorite subsection in every chapter is the Interactive Biography. Whether I mention the books, videos, articles, web content, or white papers directly in the text or not, I’ve created a comprehensive list of things I recommend to agile teams that they should read or watch if they want to understand the topic better. These are often from agile experts, people I call the ‘agile famous’, and it can be helpful to reinforce your learning by hearing their perspective.
Measure the Mindset — just how agile are you?
My journey in writing the book started as an exercise in building a smarter agile team assessment. Now, I know… There are many, many agile assessments out there. Some are way too complex. Some way too simple. And all too many of them produce a score, something that can be misused and misunderstood by uneducated leaders, for example. I also didn’t want to allow any team to judge themselves by how well they followed aspects of any framework (including Scrum and Kanban) And I definitely didn’t want teams to think they weren’t being agile just because their company wasn’t doing a good job at ‘scaling agile’.
So, the assessment focuses exclusively on the behaviors that contribute to the Agile Mindset. This is what matters most, I think. Does the team embody the behaviors that help them truly be agile? The same behaviors I describe in detail in the Practical Agilist Guidebook are the maturity measures I based the assessment on. Though, it’s more accurate to say I wrote the book based on the maturity measures.
An assessment, in my mind, should be used like a retrospective and tool for the team to improve themselves, not a score out of 100 points. What does the team think we should work on next to improve ourselves? What topics do we need to focus on? And just like in a retro, the team should gain consensus after some discussion then create some action items in their backlog to remind them of that focus.
It’s a big topic to digest “how agile are we?” so I don’t recommend doing this more than perhaps twice a year. But the assessment is fairly simple to conduct and I’ve created an early adopter program with a set of instructions for both the facilitator and the team to conduct it entirely on your own.
If you’re interested in measuring your behaviors and determining where you should work on improving, please reach out via my website at MeasureTheMindset.com
Or if you’d like to learn more, schedule some time with me to discuss.
If you enjoyed this, please clap and share. It means a lot to know my work on this blog is read and used by agilists out there in the world.
Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the complexity of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense.
The Practical Agilist Guidebook is a reference guide that gives easy to understand advice as if you had an Agile Coach showing you why the topic is important, what you can start doing about it, Scrum Master and leadership tips, AI prompts to help you explore and dig deeper, and tons of recommended books, videos, and articles. Learn more at PracticalAgilistGuidebook.com
How well is your team “being agile”? Find out at MeasureTheMindset.com. Our self-assessment tool focuses on the same 24 topics from the Guidebook and covers the modern ways of working, a combination of the Agile Manifesto and Modern Agile basics, XP, Design Thinking, Lean, DevOps, and Systems Thinking.
