Eliminating the word Agile can make you more agile.

The term?Agile?is often overused, misunderstood and misinterpreted. Agile, in many cases, is unrealistically seen as?the answer?when it comes to solving organisational design problems (‘we’re not agile enough’) — or is blamed when things aren’t going well (‘agile?doesn't work for us’).

Here is a tactic for those feeling frustrated with the fogginess and nebulousness of how ‘Agile’ is communicated and understood in the enterprise:?eliminate the word ‘Agile’ from dialog.

Probing Words

Instead of using the blanketed term Agile, use the following words to probe where rigidity, inefficiencies and obstacles exist in your organisation which constrict or block the flow of value to your customers.

Visibility

Without visibility of what products and initiatives an organisation is working on (across all levels, from the top floor to the basement), it is impossible to effectively manage the flow of work and course correct when the investment isn’t delivering value. Visibility must include clarity, simplicity and accuracy of information, as too much data can create its own opaque layer obscuring the reality of what is really going on.

Focus

Human beings are generally bad at multitasking, especially if the work requires deep thought, analysis, exploration and consideration. Multi-tasking, or task switching, will undermine individual or teams’ ability to tackle complex problems and they will end up ineffectively trying to solve many problems (or delivering solutions), rather than focusing on getting the most important ones done that will help the business gain competitive advantages.

Prioritisation

Focusing on the right things is achieved through prioritisation. To prioritise and focus on the right work, organisations need visibility of work in progress and data to help guide decisions. Data driven decision making is key here and having metrics to support prioritisation decisions is essential to avoid HIPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) based decision making.

Dependencies

Blocking dependencies are a primary cause of delays in product/project delivery. It is easy to to create a distributed web of dependencies in complex digital projects with multiple systems, vendors, platforms, development teams and partners. Not managed correctly, evolving your products and services can become gridlocked by these dependencies with long wait times for dependencies to become available, and when they do priorities have changed and organisations lurch into the next phase of gridlock.

Alignment

In agile, a lot of weight is given to cross functional teams as an essential ingredient of agility. I would argue that the underlying principle behind this is alignment. Having different disciplines aligned on goals, approach, constraints and capabilities in delivering a task, story, epic, feature is essential to frictionless and efficient delivery.

Where there is misalignment, this disrupts the flow of work due to friction, bottlenecks and/or disruption.

The key to business agility isn't about having cross functional / agile teams. True alignment comes from having ‘interactions’ and alignment?between?teams and?across?all levels of the organisation.

Identifying Problem Areas

Assessing an organisation through these perspectives (without?using the word Agile) may illuminate problem areas that need to be addressed. This could manifest in the form of these statements.

• Visibility?> I don’t know what is being worked on. I ask for something and have no idea when I am going to get it.
• Focus?> I’m being pulled from pillar to post and never seem to be able to get anything done.
• Prioritisation?> I don’t get why so much effort is being put into project?X?when I know that we could get more customers by doing Y.
• Dependencies?> We’re continuously having to work around not having?Z?available, and we’re reaching the point where we are going to have to reallocate the team as they will all be fully blocked.
• Alignment?> He/She just doesn't get it. We’re constantly talking across purposes and they really don’t understand what's really going on.

If these are themes that surface when individuals and teams (at any level in any team) complain about not being able to do their job properly, then your organisation needs to be optimised to increase time to market, respond quickly to changing conditions, capitalise on new opportunities, test and learn — and fail fast.

Fixing Problem Areas

So, how do you fix any or all of the issues identified above? Welcome to Organisational Design, the practice of changing an organisation’s processes, structures and systems to better serve and deliver on the strategic goals of the business.

Agile re-enters the picture here as a now mainstream methodology which provides its own set of principles, practices, tools and processes to improve the delivery of digital products and services.

Important note:?process?and?planning?are often maligned words when talking about Agile. Process and planning are integral in any system of work and are neutral words. There can be bad or good process and planning.

With Agile entering the picture there are the table-stakes new ways-of-working features which get adopted first, generally at the operational / delivery level of the organisation. Things like Scrum, Kanban, Stand-ups, Retros, Planning Sessions, Story Points, Backlogs, and so on. Team members are often sent on Agile training courses and return with a new dialect and sense of mission to navigate around cumbersome obstacles with the dexterity of a parkour master to get things DONE DONE and DUSTED.

However, this is where Agile can hit a brick wall and its positive impact is stopped by the non-agile conditions around it. This is a common situation in large organisations which struggle to adopt Agile practices beyond the development teams building digital products. Agility (visibility, focus, prioritisation, dependency management, alignment) needs to exist at all levels of an organisation and between teams on and between each level.

Large scale agile frameworks have emerged which seek to solve for agility in the enterprise. SAFe, LeSS and Scrum@Scale are all popular frameworks with their own nuances and varying levels of adoption (and success) by enterprise organisations.

(Not adding the Spotify Model to this list as it is a great example of a misunderstood framework that was frequently badly adopted in the enterprise. The Spotify Model started out as Spotify publishing their (continuously evolving) operating model but was taken up as a new magic sauce by many organisations without really understanding that it was born out and an illustration of an brilliant product and engineering culture, not the creator of it.)

As a final note, I will leave you with a recommendation agile framework that I have recently been learning about is the Flight Levels model, created by Klaus Leopold. Much of the thinking in this post was inspired by learning about flight levels which IMO is based on solid principles with less jargon than some other large scale frameworks.

A summary of flight levels:

Flight Levels is a concept introduced by Klaus Leopold as a way to detect opportunities for organizational improvements from different levels or flight “altitudes” — Level 1: Operational, Level 2: Coordination and Level 3: Strategic Portfolio Management. They allegorically illustrate the point of observation. In a high-altitude flight, we have a broader and strategic view of the organization. And, as we lower the altitude, we get a more detailed and operational view.

Article written by Somo Global Group Technology Director, Mark Rodseth .