How agile are you?

This dog seems pretty agile

Can you measure agility? When you break it down to its basic steps, then you can measure how quickly/effectively you can do each step. This gives you an understanding of how agile you are, and allows you to find ways to improve.

I previously argued that being agile is a lot more simple than people make out. I broke it down into four steps:

• Prioritise
• Do something
• Get feedback
• Iterate

And by “iterate”, I largely just mean repeat the first 3 steps.

Now, every company sort of does all these steps. A company can’t be a business if it isn’t doing something. Getting your end of year company accounts is one form of getting feedback. If these aren’t good enough, a company will try to change things. That’s pretty much going through all the steps above, just over a long time. What makes an agile company different is that it has the capability of doing this process really quickly.

Note, I say “capability” of doing the above. If they find from their feedback that they were heading in the perfect direction, then there is no need to re-prioritise and do something different. They just need to be capable of doing so if necessary.

So this is the bit that we need to measure to see if a company is agile. How quickly are they capable of:

1. Doing something
2. Getting feedback
3. Re-prioritising

So let’s look at what we really mean by these three things.

Do something

This can basically be measured by lead time. How quickly can you create something that you can get feedback on? For an individual, this might be how quickly can you create a version that your team/manager can give you feedback on. For a customer product team it might be how quickly you can get an improved product to market/live. For an organisation it might be how quickly you can get the first version of a new product into the hands of a customer.

Shortening lead time, working in increments and Minimum Viable Products are all attempts to do this.

Getting feedback

Just getting something done isn’t enough. You then need to make sure you are getting feedback on it. It’s no good doing things quickly if you don’t know whether your customers are enjoying it, or even using it at all. How quickly can you find out that the thing that you have done is having the desired outcome? If you are a designer and you work in short iterations, it is nowhere near as useful if you aren’t giving your team the regular chance to give you feedback.

Importantly, it’s not important to measure how quickly someone in the organisation gets the feedback. The important thing to know is how quickly it gets back to the decision maker. Your customer support person may be inundated with tweets and emails complaining about the new product launch, but if they aren’t feeding this to the person that can do something about the product then this isn’t effective. The important thing is the speed at which the feedback can get to the decision maker.

User testing, BDD and “show and tells” are all attempts to do this.

Re-prioritise

As a decision-maker with some data that has shown that your initial plan has not had the desired effect, you are probably going to change track slightly. How quickly can you shift on to something different (without waste)? Teams will often be occupied with some work of some sort, you can’t tell them to just drop what they are doing without some sort of cost. This would mean they’ve been wasting their time on something that isn’t going to deliver value. Not only is this a waste of time, but it is often extremely demotivating for the team. So the thing to measure here is either:

• How much time has been wasted if everyone switches immediately? Or
• How long until you can get people to finish what they are doing and switch priorities?

So how quickly can you spin up a new product team? How quickly can people finish what they are doing and put it live? This is strongly related to the amount of “Work in Progress” you have at any point. The less stuff you have being worked on, the less waste there would be if you switched/the quicker you can get the existing stuff live. Hence, Work in Progress limits help you achieve this, as do sprints that work towards a “potentially releasable increment”.

Now whether you are trying to understand the agility of a team, a department or an organisation, you will be measuring different things and have different expectations. So individuals, teams and organisations will have to choose their own metrics that are relevant. But I expect that everyone can at least find some sort of proxy for how quickly/effectively they can:

1. Get something valuable done
2. Get feedback on it
3. Pivot onto something different

If you can do this, then it gives you a frame for improving your agility. In our increasingly uncertain world, it is important to be agile. So this frame helps you to do number 2, with respect to improving your ways of working.

If you can’t find any proxies, then that probably shows you aren’t very good at number 2 😉.

If you enjoyed reading please give some 👏 and/or leave a comment. For more stories like this check out my publication, The Agile Mindset.