The Clear Star approach to agility

We've talked before about our definition of agility, but it feels like it’s now time to talk about the approach we take to help clients achieve greater organisational agility.

Principles over Practices

As is hopefully clear from our definition of agility, our view of success with agile is not based on the adoption of a specific framework or set of practices, but on a set of principles or values that drive new behaviours and a new organisational culture.

We have a strong view of what those principles or values might be, but any journey towards greater agility has to start with an understanding of what’s important to you as an organisation - just because we think something’s important doesn’t mean it’s important to you. Too many organisations have seen the adoption of agile practices or an agile framework as the goal, rather than the means by which to achieve a larger goal - and that requires an understanding of the sort of organisation you want to be. So that’s where we always start - helping you develop a shared understanding of what you want to achieve, what’s important to you as an organisation, and what sort of organisation you want to become.

We’re proudly agnostic with regards to agile practices and frameworks - we think they all have good and bad points. They have value as a starting point - adopting new practices builds an understanding of agile concepts, values and principles - but success for us is that organisations move beyond these to a set of practices that are a great fit for them, their people and their context, and which constantly evolve alongside their organisation. And that includes different teams working in different ways based on what works for them - in our experience what works for technical teams doesn’t necessarily work for marketing or commercial teams and vice versa.

We often hear that this is a recipe for disaster: if different teams work in different ways then it inhibits people moving between teams and makes common governance impossible. On the first, our experience has been that there’s always a cost to moving people between teams (hello Tuckman), and common working practices don’t eliminate this anyway. A better mitigation is through having a shared organisational culture and values. Enabling common governance (which has the side effect of reducing any potential collaboration frictions) does require some work, but this just requires a common framework of guardrails or guidelines for each team to work within (think standard length increment or iterations, potentially some commonality in tooling) rather than standardisation of all practices.

Leadership Agility

In our experience, any journey to greater agility that is constrained to a part of an organisation is likely to fail - the friction introduced by the use of agile practices butting up against long-established and entrenched governance and management practices is the single most significant reason why organisations don’t get the value they expect from their approach to agility.

The most significant of these frictions is often the behaviour of managers and leaders, who can block and inhibit the adoption of agile principles by believing that this doesn’t affect them. Traditional management behaviours - directing teams or people, focusing on outputs rather than outcomes, introducing change in uncontrolled and chaotic ways - will undo and undermine any benefits that might be achieved with the adoption of agile. However, if leaders take the time to understand what the adoption of agile principles means for the way they work, the way they work with and enable teams, and the way they lead the organisation, the benefits from agile can be significantly multiplied.

So that’s always the next step - working with leaders to help them with this transition, focusing on education, one-to-one and group coaching.

Governance and Continuous Improvement

The next biggest factor that inhibits and ultimately blocks the adoption of agility is, in our experience, the governance and controls that teams who have adopted agile principles work within - primarily the information they need to report and the way success is measured. Organisations often have decades of experience in how to govern traditional projects and programmes which they will inevitably try and impose upon teams trying to work in a more agile way.

We therefore focus next on helping leaders understand how governance needs to change to support both traditional and agile delivery. We focus on how to introduce tracking delivery success based on the delivery of outcomes (and leading indicators) instead of output-based milestones (alongside time and cost), and how to introduce new systems for measuring performance, efficiency and effectiveness. And then most importantly how to drive the continuous improvement of these.

The last of these is critical to the long-term success of the introduction of agility. The working practices you develop today – even if they’re a perfect fit for your people and what you do – will need to constantly evolve as the world around you changes and what you do changes to reflect that. An organisation that is constantly adjusting and optimising its working practices will be one that can rise to any future challenge.

Scaling Agility - Teams

I think we can all agree that scaling agile is a big thing, driven by both enterprise expectations (we’re a big enterprise therefore we need big agile), as well as the many scaled agile practices and frameworks. The issue we often see is that there’s confusion and misunderstanding about what scaling agility actually means.

Scaled agile teams (teams of teams) are required when a single production, solution or system is so large or complex that it cannot be built, evolved, managed and operated by a single team of people.

This is the scenario that most scaling frameworks are designed to address, but in our experience, this is a relatively rare need, and the better answer is almost always to re-factor the system to reduce this need. This means moving from a single monolithic solution that requires significant overhead costs to synchronise and coordinate teams to a distributed system that can be delivered by a network of teams with loose dependencies between them. In this scenario adopting a scaling framework out of the box is likely to incur costs and introduce overheads that are at best not required and at worst will actively reduce the ability of teams to be agile.

We have significant experience in helping clients identify the right approach to scaling agility - re-using elements of key scaling frameworks, but in a way that’s appropriate to you and your context.

Scaling Agility - Portfolio Management

The element of scaling that is absolutely required however are the elements that sit above all teams - how do we coordinate multiple teams to deliver a set of required outcomes within a time and cost envelope, and how do we structure our teams to best deliver these outcomes.

Unfortunately, this seems to be the area that’s consistently ignored on the journey to greater agility. We’ve seen too many clients who’ve adopted agile practices (usually driven bottom-up from teams) claiming they don’t need a long-term roadmap because they’re agile and can’t predict what they’re going to be doing tomorrow let alone in six months, despite the fact they’re committing to deliver an outcome to time and budget.

What inevitably happens is that the teams do good work, but focus on the wrong areas, to the wrong level of detail, meaning that they run out of time and money before they deliver all their outcomes, creating an impression that agility equals uncontrolled delivery which is not fit for purpose.

But there are good answers to this, and we’ve had significant success with Lean Portfolio Management, which introduces new approaches for delivering long-term outcomes to time and budget built on agile principles and values.

Team Agility

Last but not least, we come to the work required to help teams adopt agile principles, and our focus here is on three areas:

Firstly, education and support around agile principles and values themselves, and then exploring different agile practices and frameworks to understand how these principles and values can be put into practice. We then help them introduce an initial set of new practices, and then over time support them in evolving these to best fit the way they want to work and their context as their knowledge and understanding of the underpinning agile principles and values deepen.

Secondly, we focus on key elements of team working, covering skills such as giving feedback, entrepreneurship, and collective decision-making. All too often these softer skills are ignored when introducing agility to teams, giving them a bunch of new principles and practices to adopt, but without the skills required to operate as an effective team.

And lastly, we help teams understand their role in the organisation, their purpose, and what success looks like for them. Too many teams end up just delivering solutions that were designed by other people - this final step enables teams to take end-to-end responsibility for the delivery of value to a customer against a customer need.

Moving on from Projects & Programmes

There is a final step for organisations brave enough to take it, and that’s to move on from projects and programmes entirely, to create an entire organisational structure built around the delivery of value to customers, but we’ve talked about that in a previous blog post - organising your portfolio around value (products and services) rather than projects.

Summary

We have huge experience in achieving greater agility for teams and organisations, and for rescuing agile implementations that haven’t delivered the value expected, usually because they’ve focused on implementing a specific framework or set of practices, without understanding the principles.

If you’re interested in how we can help you, or in anything we’ve talked about here, then please reach out to us.