Agile20Reflect: Agile story told by itself

To make a case for Agile’s growth journey, let’s ask Agile itself, to tell the story.

Hello, I’m Agile! I was born with a Manifesto and 12 principles and enjoyed a very happy childhood. During my early years, I would describe myself as driven, ambitious and happy.

Going back in time and before I was conceived, people were looking for new ways of developing Software. Remember, I stand on the shoulders of great ideas which came before. To say the least, I acknowledge my many parents. Let’s bring up few of them.

Early 90s, Crystal* method was born inside IBM and thanks to Alistair Coburn. Its focus was primarily on people and their interactions. In 1993, first version of Scrum was developed by Jeff Sutherland and co.

1994, Dynamic System Development Method (DSDM) was next in the line and brought in the following principles: Focus on the business needs, baseline requirements, frequent delivery focus, active user involvement, collaborate, never compromise quality and test throughout the life-cycle, build incrementally develop iteratively, communicate continuously and clearly.

Early 2000, another set of improvements engineering practices generated significant interest among software communities. Rapidly changing requirements demanded shorter cycles, higher quality and often clashed with traditional methods of software development. XP was born. Without going into much details. The emphasis was on collecting early customer feedback, expressing requirements with simplicity in terms of customer scenarios and continuously testing so to improve quality.

 Thanks to the authors of DSDM, Scrum 1993, Crystal, XP and others who brought me to life by assessing commonalities and unifying their principles. Definitely, the manifesto was created as it represented the “one thing” the signatories could agree upon, i.e., a set of agile values and principles.

Only a few months after my birth, Scrum 2001 was born.  I started small with a focus on effective collaboration and delivering value to customers. Some people adopted me and tweaked me. I continued to grow, adding sets of tips to help me work better and adapt to more complex situations.

Other later influences included Rational Unified process* (RUP). Without going onto the details on how RUP emerged and brought into the IBM/Rational offerings, the method incorporated disciplines such as the requirements management, architecture, change management, business modeling, project management, and others. RUP was extended by the Enterprise Unified process* (EUP) where the claim was to look beyond the development and have a framework for the overall system that would cover disciplines such as Enterprise Business Modeling, Enterprise Architecture and Portfolio Management, just to name few.

Hear me out: Already in mid 2000, like a projectile motion, the path traced by EUP led to what you call today Agility@Scale and DevOps, however not yet related to “Agile”.

Other major influences that shaped me in the Solutions development

More, early 2000s have brought a sense of urgency to organizations to change or face stagnation and decline. Large scale consulting companies such as IBM and Capgemini (among others) developed Solutions life cycle methodologies, labelled as “Accelerated” Solutions or Environment. The claim here is that success depends on the speed at which an organization can respond to change, adapt and evolve. This trademark of accelerated solutions such as speed in creating value to stakeholders, fast decision cycles (enabled by agile practices and technology) are of an agile organization.

Under the umbrella of AmbySoft*, Agile Unified Process (AUP) and Agile Modeling were other successors for RUP. They showed how to take an agile approach on a RUP project.

Scott Ambler, other thought leaders and advisory team members within Rational/IBM gathered and started working on Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) framework. This droves Rational/IBM to explore new markets and spark new growth in the agile space by developing Agile offerings. As part of those offerings, the assigned team established a plan for the development of the framework, training assets, agile accelerators, agile health check, agile quick starts and several other assets to help industry adopt agile approaches in their solutions delivery. Scrum was taking popularity during the same period and DAD came at the right time to fill some gaping holes.

Yes, after a few years of my “Scrum” days, I had typical growing pains. Culture was against me, Compliance was against me, Globalization was against me and so were many managers. They told me to look beyond Scrum and they Disciplined me. They asked me to be milestone, risk-value driven and to look outside of the box to become more enterprise aware. Better yet, they told me to make context counts.

Besides, at the same period, Lean thinking provided a solid foundation in understanding and applying some concepts. So, they blended me with Lean to look good in the eyes of the executives. So, as I grew, transparency, alignment, building quality in and visualization became important. To be truly Lean-Agile, continuous delivery, continuous improvement and optimization across the entire value stream were incorporated into my “being”. In addition to being Lean –Agile, they implemented me with “Kanban.” I was told to focus on flow- lean flow, expose my work by making it visual, and provide data on how well or poorly teams were doing! Beware of the bottlenecks that would cause interruption to the flow! Needless to say, the most likely reason that Kanban fails is because people do not really understand what it is and they end up using Kanban as a waterfall in disguise!

When it comes to performance and flow and putting the two together, something that is of interest is the “Tame Flow” * approach. Probably less known but worth exploring and learning more about it. Its authors claim that in order to bring the organization in a state of high performance, one has to apply the theory of constraints (TOC) and define four fundamental flows that are present in any organization, namely:  the operational, financial, informational and psychological flow. Steve Tendon, one of the authors, found the comparison between Agile and Tame flow “uninteresting”. There is some good common ground though, especially when it comes to the overall management of flow of value and improvement practices. One has to note the power of diversity when it comes to considering several practices, no matter when they come from.

Talking earlier about context, think of it this way. a selection of an Agile framework or any approach for your transformation and process improvement, may not fit in all instances as your context factors will definitely drive the tailoring/scaling required.

Scaling me was underway with two separate streams of work

Scaling strategies based on the scaling and complexity factors were further developed under the DAD umbrella. IBM put a tremendous effort in publishing papers written by well-known thought leaders. Disciplined Agile provided the foundation” from which to “scale Agile strategically and tactically.  To enable Agile teams of teams and organizations to reach their goals of frequent, iterative value delivery, optimization across the entire value stream equally gained attention, however, got stuck in its adoption.

Without minimizing the work from Dean* on managing better software requirements, in the early Agile landscape days, Dean was also a great influencer in lighter-weight requirements management practices. In 2011, he based his Agile Enterprise model* on the requirements hierarchy that was also present in RUP: At the higher level, epics are business and IT goals that span Releases, features fit in a program release and stories are the lower planning items that are implemented by teams. The enterprise big picture was to become SAFe as you know it today!!

Seeing me growing into a moody teenager, I struggled as all teenagers do with how to think, feel, and interact with others, especially with my two biggest enemies: Waterfall and Governance. Like a growing teenager, I had the typical concerns about my looks and my influence over others and of course about being cool. “Smarter, Faster, Better” became my motto and those words shaped me! However, I was not able to go faster since automation and tools were not always following along as quickly as I grew.

Anyhow, during my muddy, oops I meant moody, age, I was told to make my users happy by delivering “Working Software.” If one agrees with this, one might also argue that without good analytical, architectural and design practices, the software or solution which were created will not be optimal. Yet, for better or worse, the agile community does not hear much about how people use these in support of their agile delivery.

I started growing further, into other areas of Agile adoption: Agile was no longer only for software teams. The whole organization could become “Agile”, but it would need a “transformation” to do so. Let me think: if I go back to my early Manifesto and the original 12 principles, would those still apply?

Shortly thereafter, Dean came up with new “SAFe” principles and so did Scott. They transformed me and added Kotter* into my evolution: “Increase urgency; Get some quick wins; build your coalition; have a vision, and you will succeed!” was the mantra. Indeed, how can you transform without a strategic organizational change management (OCM) initiative?

I’ve always been about engaging people and improving their work. Books on measurement, metrics offered good tips on how to address many common questions such as: How performance can be better measured? How people can be rewarded in a better way? How to motivate teams? And last but not least, how can organizational cultures be changed?

Mid 2015, I was still developing my unique personality and opinions. Clarity was another buzz word! Evidently, everyone should have clarity on the goals of the Agile transformation and articulate how their contribution can help. Clarity in this sense means that “the definition of success for the organization should be aligned with the definition of success for individuals, teams, managers, and executives.” Further, the business of Scaling came into fold! With the hype of “Agile Transformation” being extended to other areas of the organization, this has required enterprises to have a Vision, improve their products and services rapidly. Further, I was starting to learn why I possibly couldn’t achieve all my transformation goals. The experts believed that what was supposedly impacting my transformation was the bottleneck in the product lifecycle, the lack of vision and leadership. Remember: taking short cuts and skipping some Kotter’s steps was never to my advantage.

Further, in order to fuel business performance, and focus on the business outcomes, first, ensure scaling is well planned for by give people sufficient resources, including money and time to learn and execute in small steps. Moreover, allow for opportunities to evaluate the course of actions and pivot if necessary; Plan, Do, Check and Act (PDCA)* as Deming stated, cannot be simply kept on paper. As everyone knows, the stakes are high.

Along with the leadership question, every person in the organizational ladder is expected to be “System Thinkers,” but nobody scooped out exactly how to do this. “System Thinking” required a shift in mindset and puts a very strong emphasis on what it calls “the system” – that is, the way that the organization operates as a whole. Teams always need to be looking at their work from a big picture point of view to ensure the whole is being optimized. Wisely said!

More concepts were added to my “being” to the point where I thought “Lean” was taking over: Talking earlier about bottlenecks when it comes to flow, people had to watch for their batch sizes, their work in process (WIP) and were asked to measure their throughput. Are those data being collected? Are people getting better? Not sure that is the case, and for that reason, continuous improvement and continuous learning became the new thing to focus on, but how can you improve if you do not measure or you measure the wrong things? This question is still TOPICAL.

What else was on my way? As I mentioned, managers disagreed with me. The reason being is that I challenged them to get rid of their command-and-control hats. Regardless, it is essential for managers to step into the servant leader’s role and lead by example. Make it happen and do not let company “politics” to rule the day!

More, Silos impeded me; Project Management offices (PMO) did not embrace me fully. “Value” was not predominant in their existing reference book. As David Hodes* noted: <<Those charged with running PMOs easily get side-tracked into getting better and better at their technical proficiency in planning and executing projects while losing sight of the value such projects are there to deliver. Or, as one wit put it, ‘great landing, wrong airport’>>. The last bit is funny but true!

Today, it is about “Business Agility.”

Successful agile adoption looks beyond the need of a single program or team. Business agility was another buzz in the 2018th with the creation of the business agility institute. SAFe then, made a big shift in transforming itself and thoroughly got revised into a version claimed to be: “the world’s leading framework for business agility”. SAFe 5.0 represented areas of knowledge around customer-centricity with seven independent competencies, each made up of three different dimensions. Those dimensions represented a collection of logically related activities, skills/roles and techniques that would address different layers of agility and promote the enterprise to become outcome-based. With that, and among other changes, DevOps became part of the named “Agile product Delivery” competency, separated from the Team & Technical agility. This totally makes sense.

In order to tackle the cross-business system challenges and immerse into the layers of agility, Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) assumed to ensure consistency across, to create the critical bridge between strategy and execution, to enable tracking and visibility, and guide you through the prioritization of the most valuable initiatives (hear me:  Not projects!).  However, to plan the whole organization portfolio, organizations realized that their push for business agility conflicted with conventional governance, traditional budgeting and human resources.

Customer Centricity is only achieved when organization think in terms of value and flow of value to articulate the things that are important to their customers. Today, witnessing organizations not having a “conversation” about “value”, and skipping or by passing the creation of their value streams can have a big impact in responding quickly to market changes and opportunities. More, Value Stream thinking, born of the Lean movement goes hand in hand with a Product Operating Model. Something to consider.

This being said, “Value Management” as an established discipline with a rich body of knowledge may capture the essence of organizations moving towards a true agility. Further, would a “Value Management Office” be the way forward to?  Most probably; in order to serve better the customers, spark ideas for innovation and drive excellence.

Today, celebrating my 20 years, my story has moved beyond the early manifesto. I was given positive parenting tips by great leaders. In “retrospective” and with a fresh perspective of my Agile self, and on exactly where I, Agile, might be headed in the future, made me look forward to what’s in store for my future and what I might further grow into!

Agile, me, will probably have a new life and other names will be used to help organization to achieve their goals. It is clear that none of the existing framework have a “ready-made” recipe to offer. Talking about frameworks, which one do you think will maintain a good standing position in the future? At the end of the day, it is not about “me” but more about what challenges and problems organizations have and how they go about addressing them. Re-framing my strength is what will matter most.

References

• RUP: Trademark of Rational Unified process (IBM)
• EUP: Enterprise Unified process; Scott Ambler
• Tame flow: https://tameflow.com/
• Dean Leffingwell; SAFe: https://www.scaledagileframework.com/
• Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD); Scott Ambler and Mark Lines
• Choose Your WoW! A DAD Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working; Scott Ambler & Co
• David Hodes: https://ensembleconsultinggroup.com/the-value-management-office/