What I Hope Is Next
Agility isn’t dead, it’s just evolving
Collectively, we’ve screwed up “being agile” for everyone. And I mean a lot of us when I say “we”. I’m sure I’m part to blame as well. We’ve all overhyped agile. We’ve even glorified it like it was some Valhalla destination worth every sacrifice to achieve. And along the way, we’ve forgotten why it mattered in the first place.
It’s why I’ve turned my focus squarely to the Agile Mindset and the foundation of behaviors that help improve value delivery. Not Scrum. Not SAFe. It has to be about how we think. Customer-led. Product-driven. Value-first. Top down redesign of how we align purpose and strategy to delivery.
Whatever the reason, a whole lot of us have been wondering what’s next. We just have to survive this lull in the market. Then… oh boy… then, we’ll be able to do some really cool stuff. Right?
I mean, yeah, that’s what I’m banking on.
The list for why we’re here is long, so I feel obligated to mention some of that before focusing on what I hope becomes a much brighter future. What happened? As I’ve written about previously, I think there’s a bit of fear in the market. Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. Capital One laid off it’s agile workers… just as those darn interest rate were creating a deep fear of a recession. Then the dominoes fell (first financial firms playing me-too-ism then big tech firms) Nearly 400k people laid off in the last 18 months in tech and agile roles!
There’s also blame we all share as individuals, not just the big cash-rich monoliths which are easier to pick on. We’ve glorified certifications. Poor recruiters don’t realize that a cert means you’ve “taken the 100 level class” more than it does “have real world experience enough to write a PhD dissertation”. So, naturally, many lesser experienced people with certs got hired into roles at companies who were “trying to be agile”. Double whammy. No wonder they weren’t happy with the results. Agile doesn’t work!
But many companies have yet to realize that agile is not the destination. And, you can’t just train up software teams, hire a bunch of Scrum Masters and Product Owners and claim victory and expect productivity to rise and customers to be happier.
There’s a lot of very hard work left to be done.
Barry Overeem’s post on whether the term “Business Agility” still has any merit got me thinking. The term may be dissolving but the need is the same as it’s always been.
My theory is that after there is more confidence in the economy, our industry will come roaring back. Hopefully the focus will be on the strategic alignment between business and high level product-driven goals and refocusing the roles of managers to better support agility everywhere in the company. Whether you call it Business Agility or not, the facts are that companies still have a lot of work to do to become “agile companies” (which is what I think the Agile Alliance started calling their Business Agility track at the big conference.)
It’s funny but the world has known for a long time what they actually need to do. (Teal organizations, etc.) I think they’ve all just been kicking this can down the road while they focus on the low hanging fruit. Train the low level workers. Make the software teams agile. Build a small organization around agile stuff (i.e. CoE or LACE) and run the experiments to see if it works. A lot of focus (and pressure) has been placed on the teams with the intention of “improving delivery”.
The tropes are true. People think great agile teams will make great companies, etc. But that is not enough.
Many senior leaders (even if they can talk brilliantly about the benefits of agile) have yet to even start the very uncomfortable work that is clearly their job.
So what do executives need to do?
The very hard work has barely been touched. Create top-down support. Reorganize around a product-led strategy. Retrain and redefine management. Create tighter organizational feedback loops.
Top Down Support
For a long time, companies know if they are transforming they need both a bottoms-up and and top-down strategy. What are you actually doing to create top down support?
Mike Wisler, CIO of M&T Bank and previous Exec of Capital One Credit Division, famously worked to educate his peers at M&T Bank about agile. He asked them all to volunteer one early adopter team into the transformation so they’d have some skin in the game, spanning the entire organization. Then, he took a deck of high level agile principles to explain his strategy in terms the Board of Directors could understand about why agile was an important part of his plan. That’s an impressive start.
Be Product Led
I think everyone knows that having a strategy is smart. Even critical. Crafting a vision around delighting customers with your products is super important. But it’s way more than just words. You can’t just put a vision and mission on the wall and declare victory.
Senior leaders need to act on this information. What should they do? Reorganize the whole damn company around the product strategy, that’s what. In any big company, if you ask the teams what their biggest struggles are, it will almost always be “dependencies between teams”. Whose job is it to fix that? Scrum Masters can’t remove that blocker. Even ambitious middle managers can’t do the heavy lifting. The executives need to decide, but they need the information from the teams. Draw your dependency diagrams. Analyze who needs what. Create real longstanding end-to-end value stream driven organizations.
It won’t happen overnight, but it should be one of the most important things the executive team does. You should ask the following question:
How can we better align our company strategy to the delivery execution our customers deserve?
Maybe you should even eliminate products that don’t contribute to your mission. Once you really decide which products and services are both profitable and desirable to your customers, then you might need to make some hard choices. Every company feels like they are spread too thin. I think it’s because they’ve acted like they have infinite money for too long.
Even companies need WIP limits!
There’s a common misconception that companies “just need to break down the silos” so that the business and IT can work better together. This is only partially true. As Evan Leybourn has said (in a brilliant short episode of “Here’s The Thing” on YouTube), you cannot break down silos because humans can’t help but build communities and new ones will form immediately. So, the answer is to orchestrate them in a way that makes sense! This is where senior leadership needs to step in and codify the value streams in a way that makes it easier for work to flow from start to finish, building communitities, teams of teams, departments or divisions or whatever it takes to help the value delivery flow with less dependencies.
Redefine Management
For a while, I believed we simply neglected to train the “messy middle”. Those poor middle managers just weren’t included (or opted out!) of the training that was provided by agile transformations. But I fear it’s much worse.
In most large organizations, not only have we not re-taught the managers how their roles need to change to support agility, we haven’t changed the organization’s structure or the compensation structure either. And in some companies, these managers have been outright ignored, left to their own devices to figure out how to evolve and support the company changing beneath their feet.
So, it’s no surprise that middle managers keep on doing what they’ve always done. For 30 years in some cases, they’ve been rewarded for certain behaviors… pretending to know the answers to everything and for telling everyone what to do, solutioning for the teams, dictating work, taking responsibility for delivery dates, owning relationships with stakeholders and many more things that have become not just points of contention… but in direct conflict with what we’ve told the agile teams.
Ever work somewhere that had a great agile team culture forming… except for the relationship with the direct managers to whom the team reported? I’ve seen it to some degree on every single transformation I’ve experienced and every one I’ve ever heard about.
Some people get it and adapt swimingly to the new ways of working. But it only takes a few stubborn middle managers to create a toxic culture.
I’m not sure what the answers are, but it’s more than just “train them”, even though that’s a helluva great place to start. I do think there are likely compensation packages that need to evolve as well. So many misconceptions. Your value, for example, is not defined by how many people report to you. So many cultures have been hampered by fiefdoms, created in the same vein.
Stop Annual Cycles
And for the love of money, stop almost anything that has annual cycles! We have all learned that waiting to get feedback for a 12 month long project is way too long. So… let’s stop doing this for everything else too! Annual reviews, compensation packages, strategy alignment, hiring plans, budget cycles, etc.
There are way better ways to work iteratively as a company… starting with strategy-driven company-wide OKRs. What’s the most important thing the whole company needs to do in the next three months? Then align critical functions that are always left behind like finance and HR to those shorter OKR cycles so that operations dovetails with value delivery.
Aligning these quarterly cycles with a product-led strategy is almost guaranteed to create better results. Each department or division should know their role in what they need to do in order to align with the top down company strategy. That should focus their efforts on customer-driven, product-led measurable outcomes. And if they’re wrong, shift gears next quarter!
We can’t change the macroeconomics factor of quarterly public company financial cycles, but that has an impact as well. Ironic, I realize. The outside-in focus on how a company is doing every three months creates a mad scramble to present tremendous progress every three months, which actually limits the creativity of companies (to embrace longerterm efforts that may not pay back financially for a while). So, while we can’t change the public company “quarter-itis”, we can change the discourse. We can start being more transparent about short-term goals vs. long-term goals and how we’ll measure and report on each.
How Soon is What’s Next?
No one can predict the future, but what we know is that the biggest companies in the world have gotten a lot bigger since the pandemic. Capitalism is alive and well. But, the biggest companies have ratcheted back spending.
My gut instinct tells me that as soon as those interest rates creep back up in the right direction, it will spark the change. All it will take after that is one or two directionally correct indicators; positive quarterly results from the right company, a consumer buying index increase, etc. then that will be the wellspring that companies need to start spending again.
I just hope the lessons we’ve all learned about the agile industry are better understood and we can start doing the hard things that will bring about real change.
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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.
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