Failure to Launch

Has agile stalled? I don't know...I guess it depends on if it ever even really launched. I don't mean launch in the sense that we made a lot of noise (and a lot of money), I mean launch in the sense that we delivered. That we made anything actually better. Not better from the perspective of selling you agile- from the perspective of every single one of you on the opposite end sitting in planning meetings, trying to hit deadlines, and trying to explain to a board of directors why we can't have that number of story points for that amount of money.

We failed to find flow. We introduced a bunch of expensive overhead intended to keep things moving forward when in fact we created a bunch of unnatural stops and starts in everything we do. We promised predictability with a system built around fake math hinging on perfect up front design that we all know isn't accurate. And maybe worst of all, we promised a blissfully happy workforce of people humming along solving their own problems and never feeling burned out while we made them march to impossible expectations that they never agreed to (and oh yeah, stay in this team for ever or it all breaks down).

We have never been able to prove the ROI on Agile because it is expensive as hell. I don't know how to tell you that its working, only to tell you that its done. And maybe thats where we stalled- or why so many companies are calling it quits. We cant figure out if its helping us do anything other than to? say we are "maturing our agile practices" meanwhile,? we are losing customers, money, investors, and opportunities ever day. But we got really fucking good at being agile.

Where do we go next? Well lets pause for a minute and revisit what we promised in the first place. We said we could promise that you would be able to deliver what customer wanted, when they wanted? it (effectiveness). We promised that you would be able to allocate your economic investments? in the most optimal way (efficiency). And we told you we could do all of this while accurately forecasting delivery within an acceptable degree of uncertainty (predictability).

I'd say we failed. We continue to say teams “are doing it wrong” or they aren’t following practices by the book if they are not getting the results we promised - but if its that hard to get it all right maybe we made it too complex.

How do we fix this? We have to get back to the practices that allow our teams -whether its development, marketing, HR- to find FLOW in their work. To focus on the highest priority work (what ever that is at that moment), to know how to bring their available capacity to the work that needs the most attention, and to be able to do that every damn day without all of the upfront noise that make it impossible for us to do what we were hired to do and do it well.

I think its far easier than we give it credit.?

Make your work visible. Understand how long its been in progress. And math.

To? actually find our flow, it means we simplify everything we have been told to do. I don't think you need me there every morning to tell you not to pull in more work. I don't think you need me there to ask you to explain how complex the work is. I don't even think you need me to tell you how broken this all is.

You need a simple strategy, and you need some data. Let's go.