How to Lead with Agile-ity. Lessons from #agileAus 2010 Agile Leadership workshop in Melbourne

I spent a few valuable hours on Wednesday morning, 14 September at the 2010 Agile Executives & Leaders Workshop with Jim Highsmith, co-author of the Agile Manifesto and Director of Cutter Consortiums Agile Product & Project Management practice , and others discussing

• revising performance measurements
• facilitating self-organizing teams
• developing strategies for the operational portfolio
• and strategic agility.

Below are some of my thoughts and takeaways, Jim’s book recommendations and links for further reading. I’ve included a mindmap as a structure to further develop for your own Agile journey. I used iThoughtsHD for the iPad to capture this. Enjoy and please comment below… Here’s a snapshot if you’re not inclined to read all the detail…

My Key Take aways The Leadership goal is Proactive Agility — Create and respond to change to remain competitive STEP 1 — Develop Strategies. Some high level steps to get you started…

• Understand the drivers and strategy of the organization
• It’s useful to understand if your organization is primarily driven by
• Responsiveness = Agileexample: Googleover
• Efficiency = Traditionalexample: Wal-Mart
• and to position these in terms of a Goal vs Constraint
• An example from my personal experience is the IT Systems Integration and IT Outsourcers/Service Provider space where Agile is a hard internal sell, as these organizations need to position themselves in the market as thought-leading, fast moving agile organizations, but their profits are derived from strong, repeatable process to drive efficiencies to deliver the price point demanded by the customer.
• This creates the famous paradox of agile!
• How to transition to benefit from the Agile approach while still delivering profits?
• Requires development of an Agility Roadmap
• Position the organization in terms of the commitment level to Agile
• Strategic
• Organizational Leadership understands and actively drives Agile
• Portfolio
• Agile portfolio management level
• Operational
• most Agile programs start at this level
• Agile business strategy drives delivery strategy
• Measured by
• Business Responsiveness
• Quality
• Investment
• Business Impact
• Continuous Delivery applied at all 3 levels, being
• Continuous Development
• Continuous Integration = Many organizations are here
• Automated Testing
• Continuous Deployment
• Automated Deployment
• We could expand this to include
• continuous Change Management?
• continuous Training?
• My observation is that possibly it is less about volume of features deployed than integration between stacks to ensure integrated quality output in a streamlined way
• Shifting leadership thinking and measures

• Traditional Iron Triangle = assumes Minimal change . “Plan — Do” Personal note: I have spent the best part of my career to date implementing this model, with Prince 2, PMP and PMO’s for large organizations, but I like the Agile thinking as I believe a hybrid of the 2 models can solve many of the challenges currently faced. The challenge is how to control the Iron Triangle while delivering quality with adaptable reliability?
• Scope
• Cost
• Schedule
• Agile Triangle = enables inevitable changes “Envision — evolve” . Includes
• Necessary Constraints
• Scope
• Cost
• Schedule
• Actual Goal
• Value (Releasable Product)
• measured by the least functionality (see Lean Startups ) to satisfy the customers business objectives
• Quality (Reliable, Adaptable Product)
• Reliable = works consistently
• Adaptable = Future proof, maintainable
• so how do you sell this into your organization?
• Prove operational level Continuous Integration success to gain buy in from the Portfolio level
• see ci
• see portfolio level
• STEP 2 — BE Agile
• So what is agile?
• Agile Manifesto
• Declaration of InterDependence
• Agile Project Leadership Network
• Shifting focus to leaders and execs away from pure PM focus
• So what about “self-organizing teams”
• The key message to leaders is lead by demonstrating the Agile behaviors in ALL areas of the organization
• stop asking for the detailed project plan to deploy the Agile Project ;-)
• move from command-control to lead-collaborate
• Embrace the fact that you are the Rider of Paradox
• You DO need to be predictable AND adaptable
• Predictable
• Reliable, not repeatable
• Agile
• Releasable Product Value
• Quality
• Constraints
• see Agile triangle
• Cadence (Release cycle) & Capacity vs detailed task/schedule
• Adaptable
• shift your behavior from ‘conforming’
• Focus on work throughput to reduce the actual issue which is too much work in progress
• Agile Leadership Values
• Cultivate a Visionary, facilitating, constraining style
• Evolve thru vision vs plan everything
• Evolutionary action
• Managers manage teams and teams manage the tasks
• Oversee and provide direction
• Facilitate flow of teams and change management
• Value over Constraints
• Adapting over Conforming
• Team over Tasks
• STEP 3 — Do Agile
• Doing Agile as a leader entails
• Lead
• Provide focus, clarity and decisions and direction
• Facilitate
• create a frictionless working and collaboration environment
• Constrain
• The hard but valid corporate stuff
• People, Money, Priorities & Time allocation
• Anticipate the future in terms of
• Time
• Learn and appreciate Time Pacing
• Transitions
• Create responsive systems
• Structure
• create agile design guidelines
• see http://blog.cutter.com/2010/01/26/understanding-the-nature-of-self-organizing-teams/
• create adaptive architectures
• delivers what leaders want — more & now
• Technical Debt
• The workshop noted that getting resources and funding to address this is a really hard sell
• ideas were to choose language carefully, depending on audience
• position in terms of
• $ for Sales organizations
• Time to market in product organization
• demonstrate cost of change in terms of time and $ with and without technical debt
• ‘pad’ projects
• ok in smaller project environments
• can only deliver rapid future value if managing technical debt in the present
• TD prevention and reduction strategy should be in place continuously
• create a vision and action plan to transform to Agile
• Bold and clear vision
• evolutionary not revolutionary
• full organizational commitment
• evolve a hybrid agile approach
• scalable, appropriate processes & practices
• Must have product vs process focus
• Evolve a hybrid approach
• Portfolio management
• Project Management
• Release management
• Manage outside time
• Iteration management
• Managing inside team
• Tech
• Scrum
• Xp
• adopt agile behaviors
• persist
• create KPI’s that drive the desired behavior, not metrics for the sake of it = agile metrics?
• consider an Agile Governance system
• balance
• Investment & risk
• Dollars and time are not iterative
• When they’re gone they’re gone
• These are linear, not agile. Consider this when communicating
• over
• Gates
• Envision
• Explore
• Deploy
• Measure agile proficiency
• Value
• Consider Speed to value measures
• self-sustainable Quality
• Time
• Cost
• Scope
• see ‘Satir Change Model’
• THE key driver of behavior and a favorite enabler of mine: Performance Measurement
• I’ve seen too many Performance Measurement / KPI systems fail due to
• Implementation because we should have one
• to please HR
• arbitrary metrics to please the Leaders
• Metrics unrelated to OUTCOMES
• Rating system to ‘influence’ salary review discussions
• There is only one reason for the existence of KPI’s — encouraging behavior of the team members to deliver quality value and a great experience to the customer — internal or external
• Jim suggest basing KPI’s on the Agile Triangle
• Agile Triangle = enables inevitable changes to “Envision — evolve”
• Necessary Constraints
• Scope
• Cost
• Schedule
• Actual Goal
• Value (Releasable Product)
• measured by the least functionality to satisfy the customers business objectives
• Business Benefits over customers pre-conceived solution
• early release delivering maximum business benefit
• Quality (Reliable, Adaptable Product)
• Reliable
• works always
• earlier testing against test cases
• Quality=can I release this today
• Adaptable
• Future proof, maintainable
• Quality of maintainable code
• Adaptable =can it produce value in the future easily
• NOTES: There was a fair bit of discussion on how to cost Agile projects? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below…
• Jim suggested that costing can be done at the Capability level
• Minimum work to create cost
• High level estimate, plan, tech design based on hybrid use cases
• Cost & Scope here
• Recommended Reading from this workshop Recommended Links The two major traditional project management methodologies have established working groups to address the impact of Agile and hybrid models.
• PMI is has created an agile special interest group here
• Prince 2 has published a white paper on hybrid projects. On the way to Agile?
• Recommended Twitter handles to follow:
  
  [ff aplndotorg jimhighsmith ericries]
  
  Mindmap from the Workshop

• In conclusion, the workshop was excellent value and thought-provoking. I’ve attempted to capture the essence and look forward to your views and comments below…