Agile in Management Consulting – the Whitetree House View

Agile project management has existed in various forms since at least the 1990s, was formalised in 2001 with the publication of ‘The Agile Manifesto’ and has long been the norm for software development. Over recent years, it has become ever more popular in wider business circles thanks to its focus on adaptability to change, maximisation of value and minimisation of waste. In this first of three articles, Whitetree’s Tom Baker provides an overview of Agile techniques, their application to the consulting industry, and insight from his experience of using these in transformation initiatives across various sectors.

Imagine delivering for your client a project which precisely meets their business needs, is on-time and on-budget, achieves a high degree of quality, ensures they and you enjoy clear communication and a sense of control throughout, and leaves the project team and wider stakeholders feeling motivated, empowered, and engaged. Done well, ‘Agile’ goes a long way to guaranteeing you that vision.

Project Management is but one use of ‘Agile’ as a practice and mindset; it can be applied to programmes, operations, procurement, supply chain management and more. Many advocates of Agile (‘Agilists’) are known to apply it to their personal lives, too – I for one unashamedly use a Kanban board to track household tasks and maintain a Prioritised Requirements List to manage my ongoing DIY house renovation (these and other terms are explained below).

Agile was formalised in the software development industry, with its genesis in the ‘Agile Manifesto’ of 2001. However, it traces its heritage further back than this, notably with the emergence of Scrum in the 1990s and earlier still, to the Lean manufacturing revolution of 1960s Japan. It is strongly influenced by Systems Thinking, which itself dates to the 1950s. It is clear that Agile has value beyond the relatively narrow application of project management alone.

Further, Agile offers a suite of different methodologies, that can be used in themselves or combined, or tailored, to meet specific customer requirements. There is not room in this article to go into depth on these, however, a light-touch comparison and review is the topic for the third article in this series. This article will draw principally from AgilePM?, the Agile Business Consortium’s formalisation of the Dynamic Systems Development Model (DSDM), which is itself covered more fully in the second article in this series.

Applied to consulting, Agile’s most important benefit is its insistence on always understanding the client’s needs – helping them to clarify and refine these needs themselves. This is achieved through application of the principles.

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development (Agile Manifesto) states four values:

It is a common misconception that these values translate as ‘there is no need to plan’, ‘we don’t need management artefacts’, ‘it’s OK to let the scope creep’ and so on, and that this leads to a slip-shod approach with poor governance and a lot of risk. In fact, this is far from the truth. For one thing, the manifesto clearly states that, though the values shown here in bold take precedence, those left un-bolded are still important.

Let’s now look at these values in the context of their associated principles, as also stated in the Agile Manifesto, and consider their importance to consulting. For the purpose of this article, the principles have been simplified and amended to suit the context of consulting over software development.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

• The team regularly reviews its working practices and behavioural norms and adjusts these to improve performance and ways of working. Whilst it is important to focus on client acceptance of the work delivered, and the improved quality of their products, take time to sit client teams down and reflect on how their ways of working could also be improved. Is over-use of email wasting time and destroying productivity and morale? Did they take on too much, or too little work in the last delivery period? Did they correctly prioritise the tasks they took on? Such insight, if captured and acted upon, can dramatically improve the quality of output and the happiness of staff.
• Self-organising teams produce the best quality designs and solutions. As consultants, we are here to make sure the job gets done and we deliver benefit. But we must also have one eye on the handover; are you leaving your client with a sustainable legacy that they can continue to build on? Or will things go back to how they were after you left? Introducing democratic techniques such as ‘planning poker’ (to estimate the size of a given task) and MoSCoW prioritisation (to determine the relative importance of a one task versus another, and hence decide the order they should be worked on) and using ‘User Stories’ to state what must be delivered, but not how it should be delivered, empowers staff and builds buy-in to the work.
• Agile processes promote sustainable delivery – all stakeholders should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely. Agile planning requires the collaborative involvement of all members of the development team, and roles such as Scrum Master are tasked with ensuring the team are not pressured into committing to an unfeasible amount of work over a given period. Not only does this protect staff from burnout, it also ensures the quality of the output. One of the advantages of Agile is it can be used seamlessly as a change initiative becomes Business as Usual. Consultants can provide valuable insight to a client as to whether they have got this balance right and leave a sustainable legacy.
• The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation. In this era of remote and hybrid working, it is less feasible than it once was to have the entire development team meeting face-to-face over a Kanban board. Nonetheless, some firms have gone to huge effort to relocate and collocate teams so that situational awareness and working relationships are optimised. This can be replicated to some degree by having a ‘window’ (conferring app running the whole time, to which individual team members who are not co-located can call colleagues for a conversation at any time). The conscientious consultant can advise judicious use of conferring applications and efficient use of concentrated in-person meetings to replicate these benefits.
• Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, then trust them to get the job done. As an external adviser, consultants are in a strong position to encourage managers to give the right amount of direction and no more, to empower their staff and set the conditions for innovation. The consultant themself can offer coaching, mentoring and guidance, whilst avoiding the temptation to be prescriptive.

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Valuable Deliverables over comprehensive documentation

• Deliver useful outputs frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference for the shorter timescale. Just as smartphone apps have bug fixes and improvements delivered frequently, rather than waiting for the user to download a periodic, major update, consultants should look to deliver useful outputs for their clients as early as possible, and build on these incrementally over the life of the contract, to reach the best possible end solution.
• Prioritise customer satisfaction through early and continuous delivery of valuable deliverables. Much as stated in the above principle: a multi-month piece of consultancy that culminates in a lengthy report full of recommendation right at the end of the contract has not exploited opportunities to course-correct and refine the solution along the way. What if this ‘end product’ isn’t quite what the client needed? What if, for whatever reason, the contract is terminated early? The risk of waste is too great. By delivering early, you can be sure of adding value for your client.
• Simplicity – the art of maximising the amount of work not done – is essential. The consultant is in a privileged position of being able to spot where processes and practices are not adding value, and to be able to point this out to the client (in a constructive way). In the software industry, an over-engineered solution is a wate of developer time, will require more maintenance and is likely to be less user-friendly. Just so in business practices – is that extra approval step necessary? Is anybody reading this monthly report? Lean techniques such as Value Stream mapping can be used to good effect here, to evidence the point.
• Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility. This is a key point – Agile only works if there is a focus on quality. This is achieved by making sure testing is introduced early in the development process. For example, before the consultant makes recommendations to senior managers or executives in the company, they should run the proposal past suitable staff, and model and test the ideas wherever possible. This saves waste of valuable assurance time. The development team itself can be a useful first line of defence for audit and quality assurance. Consulting firms should prioritise development of their own staff to ensure their technical competencies are sound.
• Working software [useful outputs] is the primary measure of progress. This is key to good consultancy – the bottom line should be ‘what tangible benefits has my work created for my client’? Agile deplores ‘vanity metrics’ in overly complex dashboards that mask the important data in unnecessary performance stats, time on task or lists of governance gateways achieved. The Scrum method, for example, distils this to burn up charts (showing level of work achieved in the project to date against the overall work in scope), and burn down charts (showing how much of the intended work planned for a given period is left to do). These simple metrics, when displayed transparently, allow all stakeholders to understand the levels of progress and make obfuscation impossible. Agile, like Lean, mandates that work in progress (WiP) is kept to a minimum, as summed up in the phrase ‘stop starting, start finishing’, because a product is only of value to the customer once it has been completed.

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Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

• Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the process. Regular meetings with all stakeholders are key to developing a good solution collaboratively and incrementally, and escalating blockers early for swift resolution and timely decision making. There is no room for assumption not procrastination in this environment.

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Responding to change responding to change over following a plan

• Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile harnesses change to give the customer competitive advantage. As put by Bob Johanson, we are looking to turn ‘Volatility, Uncertainty, Change and Ambiguity’ to ‘Vision, Understanding, Clarity and Agility’. An analogy might be a football team carrying out concise, timely passes culminating in a successful goal attempt, rather than a striker making a strike from the halfway line which, though accurate at the point of kicking the ball, is soon sent off track by subsequent changes (player intervention).

In summary then, the application of Agile mindset, values, principles and carefully selected practices can offer a way for the consultant to fully understand their client’s needs, and work with them in an empowering and collaborative way to zero in on the optimum solution. Whilst it is not a panacea, and is not right for every project, it is a smart, rewarding way to add value for your clients. Look out for the second article in this three-part series, where we take an in-depth look at AgilePM (arguably the most comprehensive and rigorous methodology), and the final article, where compare other Agile and waterfall methodologies.

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Tom Baker (https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/tom-baker-a7094538/ ) is a Principal Consultant in Whitetree’s Management Services Team. He is an AgilePM practitioner, trainer and recognised Agile Business Catalyst by the Agile Business Consortium (https://www.agilebusiness.org/ ), of which he is a professional member.

Whitetree provides quality solutions that add real value to our clients.? We specialise in the provision of bespoke solutions in Management services, Business Winning, Decision Support, Training Solutions, In Service Support and Talent Acquisition. Agility is at the core of our approach. We work at speed and adapt often, always guided by our clients’ needs. For more information, please visit https://whitetree.co.uk/