Agile is not the main character of the Transformation!!

Back in 2003, IBM made a 2.1 Bn purchase of Rational Software Co. and instantly became the darling of the industry in the space of Rational Unified Process (RUP). Rational and then IBM were holding annual conferences with over 4,000 people attending as late as 2010!!

At the 2010 conference, IBM decided to rename the conference from Rational Conference to IBM Innovate as a sign that RUP was in life support.

To be clear, Rational was created as a company back in 1981, but became the famous RUP care taker by 1994. Therefore, RUP stayed alive for about 16 years and came to stardom as the movement later known as Agile was taking shape.

IBM tried unsuccessfully to keep RUP alive by creating Open Unified Process in the Open Source space, but it was clear that Agile was unstoppable and RUP was dead.

For those of us old enough to live in the RUP times, we remember how having the RUP certs opened any doors in big organizations all over the world, not to mention the outlandish consulting rates.

As usual, the question is: Why something as powerful as RUP, backed by IBM, perhaps the most powerful company at the time, failed?

Because of the same reason Agile will fail soon: IBM made RUP the central character of the transformation, completely misunderstanding that, just like TQM before, RUP was only about changing the culture of the organization and using the tools in the process to determine the maturity of the transformation.

Does it sound familiar to what is happening with Agile now? Large commercial companies are trying to own the Agile space by locking companies into scaling frameworks and tools while consulting companies focus on "making themselves look good while charging astronomical rates."

RUP was only a temporal supporting character that aged quite quickly and died prematurely (or transformed into a zombie well-known not-so-safe scaling framework).

Does the business care that everyone is drinking the same Kool-Aid or smoking the same weed and self-congratulating themselves because of the incredible high they have?

"We are a RUP company" has been replaced by "We are an Agile company" but with few exceptions we are not seeing the explosive growth across the board that should be accompanied by the promised Agile revolution.

So if Agile is not the main character, what is it? The answer is quite simple: FLOW!

RUP died because its bureaucratic implementation got in the way of FLOW!

Agile will die if it continues to get in the way of FLOW!

The biz cares about improvements in Throughput, Lead, Delay and Cycle Times, Time to Market, Adaptability, etc. All these metrics are part of the definition of FLOW! Having Agile impact FLOW will only cause it to become another RUP.

Why would Agile impact FLOW? Among other reasons, whenever we neglect creating Value Streams before attempting a transformation, it is quite likely that we are sub-optimizing the Value Stream, impacting negatively FLOW!

It is very likely that the existing Value Stream has reached an optimization point through the inefficiencies and bottlenecks of the past (Figure below).

When we introduce a transformation that only affects part of the Value Stream, the optimization is gone and FLOW is impacted significantly (Figure below).

It is easy to see that teams introduced to Agile (Green) are suddenly out of sync with the waterfall teams (black) communication and collaboration breaks and silos increase.

Moreover, without the Agile agents knowing, trust among the teams is destroyed. Immature Scrum Teams start to behave like prima donas and traditional teams become resentful. Moreover, Scrum teams start chastising traditional teams (amplifying the voice of immature Coaches) and any resemblance of collaboration disappears.

To avoid making the same mistakes as with previous approaches, we need to make sure that we identify, acknowledge and preserve the FLOW. Before we tinker with the organization we need to look for the Value Streams, bring all the teams part of the Value Stream into the transformation and then make sure we are not negatively impacting FLOW.

Agile is about culture transformation, Lean is about process improvement, FLOW is about keeping the organization commercially viable.