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
Shifting focus to leaders and execs away from pure PM focus
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
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…