stop scaling start growing agile

Stop scaling… Start growing an agile organization

Dhaval PanchalAgile Coach & Trainer dhaval.panchal@agile42.com @dhavalpanchal

What to scale?

DeliveryModel?

Organizational Structure? Teams and

Processes?

Agile at Scale Frameworks

You didn’t try hard enough! cargo cult Agile

OrderedUnordered

Simple

ComplicatedComplex

ChaoticSense�Categorize�Respond

Best�Practices

Good�Practices

Sense�Analyze�Respond

Probe�Sense�Respond

Act�Sense�Respond

Emergent

Disorder

Cynefin Framework

Fit for Purpose

New Organization

(up to 60 people)

Grown Organization (from 60 to 500 people)

Corporation (from 500 to many thousands people)

“One size fits all?”… Not in practice… but in Principles!

We need to scale agile because our projects are very large

So why don’t you make your

projects smaller?

The heart of an agile organization…

Client & Value focus

Self-Organization

& Autonomy

Iterative & Incremental

change to reduce the

Continuous Im

provement

Three step guide to failed transition

• Pick favorite Agile scaling framework. (when you know least about “fit for purpose”)

• Document new processes, roles and responsibilities.

• Install Agile tools to enforce standardization of practices.

People resist being coerced

Experiences

Beliefs

Actions

Results

Culture

The “Results Pyramid” is copyright of Partners in Leadership LLC

balanc

coaching is an ongoing long term investment

Coaching for Results

Growing Agile is the agile way

Culture as first class concernCulture eats strategy for breakfast

“This is how we do things around here…”

Culture is the set of behaviors that have been established and accepted within an organization

Make Culture Explicit

• Structured conversations

• Culture profile

• Give voice to implicit

Schneider Culture Model

Cultural Shift: Growing Agile

Cultivation Competence

Control Pe

Impersonal

Actuality

Possibility

Collaboration

William Schneider - The four Core Cultures

Agile Values & Principles

Most of the organizations today have a strong Hierarchy oriented profile

They struggle to introduce a more agile and lean approach to work, because the hierarchical culture is not supportive of agile values and principles

“If you can make culture explicit, you can agree where you stand, and where you want to go…”

There are two ways of encouraging behaviors within an organization: 1. Story telling and role-modeling (e.g: empathy and tradition, walk

the talk) 2. Ritualization (e.g: Scrum events, Ritual Dissent, Open Space)

Growing Agile Principle: Make your culture explicitOrganizational culture exists, whether we acknowledge it or not, and making explicit allows for better alignment and context creation

Iterative & Incremental ChangeOrganizations change, when people in them change

The traditional approach to change management…

…focused on standardization, before stabilization…

Design

Documentation

Rollout

Fix Issues

> 3-4 months…

The agile approach to change management…

Design

RolloutDoc

≤ 12 weeks t

…focused on stabilization with emergent standardization…

Design Coach

RolloutDoc

Agile Strategy Map™

Goal PSF NCDefine the Goal we want to achieve

Possible Success Factor (PSF) represents a hypothesis about a key factor that would enable us to achieve the Goal

Necessary Condition (NC): what is needed in order to fulfill the Success Factor

Strategy Map from March 2014

• The Goal for 2015 has been established

• The Transition Team identified at least 7 PSFs that would provide a powerful leverage to achieve the final Goal

Cross-department Agile champions

team models Agile behaviors and

nurtures environment for

Agile transition to succeed.

Growing Agile Principle: Focus on small incremental changesWhenever changing from one way of working to another, we will go through a hybrid situation where the coexistence of two different ways generates attrition, duplications and other forms of waste. The awareness of this fact should push us in delivering changes fast and in small increments…

Organize for value deliveryFocus on the work, not on the worker.

The matrix organization…

Project 1

Project 2

Project 3

… optimized for utilization, not value delivery…

Handovers and coordination

Client

Push in the lines

Stream 1

Stream 2

Stream 3

The agile organization…

… optimized for value delivery and time to market

Client

Pull on the streams

Opportunity Canvases to create context and focus on Customer Value…

Lean Portfolio Canvas™ have been created by agile42 and are licensed using Creative Common 3.0 with attribution (BY), non commercial usage (NC) and share alike (SA) options. You can reuse and modify the template, but you will always have to leave the logo on it.

Opportunity Name (title)

1. Opportunity 2. Customer SegmentsWhat is the problem to be solved? What type of customers & users will

benefit from this solution?

How is the customer solving the problem right now?

3. Possible SolutionWhat are the key points of a possible solution to the presented problem?

4. BenefitsWhat are the benefits for the customers?

6. Measuring SuccessWhat metrics will be best measure the success of the feature?

5. Business ReadinessWhat steps are required from the business side to be able to use this capability?

7. Cost of DelayWhich profile better represent the cost of delay (CoD)?

8. Costs StructureHow does the cost structure look like for such a feature? One time, ongoing costs, contractors expenses, development costs?

9. Value to Customer and BusinessWhat are the expected incremental revenue for selling this feature, and what are the strategic and tactical benefit? What are the intangible values (usability, performance, customer knowledge obtained...)

Opportunity Owner (name)

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Unified Portfolio and Program System to increase transparency, to visualize Customer Value and dependencies

Growing Agile Principle: Focus on value and organize accordinglyFocusing on value means to make sure that there are as few obstacles as possible in the direction of the value streams…

Decentralize controlSandbox of creativity, accountability, and team work.

Control !

Worker 1

Worker 2

Sub 2 Sub 3

The hierarchical organization… Centralized Control, ends up overloaded, introducing delays

Authorization

the design is based on mistrust…

Scale this?In hierarchies, getting anything done involves workers in a complex web of requestors, approvers, and reports. Overhead of managing work is often larger than cost of doing work.

Team as container for empowerment

Worker 3Worker 2

The agile organization… Decentralized Control reduces overhead, and encourage collaboration

the design is based on trust…

Worker 1

Collaboration

No two teams have same task board design, no two teams have copy-cat practices.

Clear explicit policies describe range of autonomy teams have. AND program metrics

Product Owner(s) container for discovery and breakdown of Epics.

Team containers for managing stories

Done stories and epics.

Transparency builds trust between Portfolio Management and Delivery teams

Growing Agile Principle: Decentralize control whenever possibleDecentralization of control and decision making, reduces the feedback loops, and enables faster reaction times. It requires defining containers for empowerment, to allow for autonomous decision making.

De-synchronized flowAre the trains running on time?

Project 2

Project 3

Project 1

The plan driven organization… Synchronization of all Projects for a release, decreases efficiency and increases coordination costs

Release

…fixed scope and fixed date…

The agile organization… De-synchronization of development teams to reduce cost of release

…variable scope and variable date…

Feature A

Release

Team 1

Team 2

Team 3

Team 4

Feature B

Release Release

Feature C

Release

Feature D

Release

Feature E

Automated testing and focus on Epics allowed to go to market on time, and build capability to incremental enter new states.

Switch from big product releases to incremental change, every feature is released on all platforms

“Focusing on one Feature at a time allowed for faster feedback also involving stakeholders was easier… deliver fast to learn fast”

Growing Agile Principle: Avoid synchronization of flows unless necessaryDe-synchronization is unintuitive, but allows for parallel distributed work, without having to carry the excessive burden of coordination and handovers…

Overall lessons learnedChanges in behavior happens thanks to focus on principles and values, the resulting emergent systems showed recurring and reusable patterns that may reproduce similar behaviors…

Strategy

Pilot Projects

Rollout

Enterprise Transition Framework (ETF)

so what?

1. There is no blueprint for an Agile Organization, as from the moment you’ll try to define one, it won’t be Agile anymore!

2. Scaling the delivery model won’t make your organization agile, you need to change the culture too!

3. Becoming an Agile organization should never be your goal, it is a means at best!

4. Becoming an agile organization is a team sport, and still everyone needs to start the change from within!

5. Experience shows that there are recurring patterns emerging by embracing specific principles… so use them!

At your own risk! ;-)

Thank You!

More food for thought...

Copyrights noticeAll material produced in this presentation is protected by the Creative Common License 4.0 (by-nc-sa).

The brands and logos of agile42, Enterprise Transition Framework ETF (http://agile42.com/etf/), Team Coaching Framework TCF (http://tcf.agile42.com/) and Agile Strategy Map (http://www.agile42.com/en/agile-transition/agile-strategy-map/) are Copy Rights and Trademarks of agile42 GmbH, and agile42 International GmbH and can’t be reused without written authorization

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