Going Beyond Agile: A New Opportunity
?Agile started with innovators and early adopters as a team-centric approach to creating new products. Two decades later, it is being used almost everywhere by the late majority. Much has been learned over this time, but most of this has not been integrated into the dominant Agile offerings.
While Agile has moved us forward from Waterfall, the lack of a scientific approach and a reliance on empiricism without a validated model of understanding has caused the movement to stagnate, if not go backward.
There are 12 related concepts that mark the path to significant improvement over the current state of Agile. I list each of these below and the benefits one gets when one attends to them.
Amplio is organized around these. This does not mean Amplio is the way to achieve these. Amplio takes a scientific approach to what improves business agility. Amplio is merely my collective approach.
Twelve Dimensions That Facilitate Achieving Business Agility.
1. Driving from Executive Sponsors’ Values and Success Criteria
A company needs a focus on its strategies. These depend upon having clarity of the executive sponsors’ values and success criteria. With this alignment, conflict resolution can be achieved. Without it each part of the system will be competing with the others. ?The best result without this is constantly trying to resolve differences which causes both wasted effort and too many initiatives in play to be efficient.
Symptoms of not doing this: difficulty in resolving conflicts between requested initiatives. This typically results in too many initiatives being started.
2. Systems thinking
Organizations are systems, not a collection of teams. Taking a systems thinking point of view helps create alignment and reduces the effort required for external coordination of teams. Systems thinking also means attending to how people will react to whatever methods are being adopted. This can make the methods be more fit for purpose and cause less resistance.
A systems thinking perspective can be facilitated by using value stream management to create a perspective of the whole while showing how all of the components of the organization relate to each other and the organization’s internal and external stakeholders. This avoids the issues brought up when bottom-up, top-down or even bottom-up with top-down approaches are discussed. To be effective, a holistic view is needed.
Symptoms of not doing this: teams will locally optimize, hurting the overall creation of value.
3. First principles of knowledge work
The first principles of knowledge work are like the laws of what makes for effective knowledge work. First principles stand on their own. They are not defined but are discovered through observation and relentless evaluation. Violating them has consequences, typically creating waste and lost opportunities. They can be used to provide guidance as to what individuals, teams, and organizations should do or avoid without having to run experiments to determine what works.
Knowing first principles creates clarity on what practices will work in a given situation. Attending to first principles to achieve quick feedback can result in eliminating the waste that would result if only an empirical approach was being used.
Amplio enables this by having created the Factors for Effective Value Streams based on Eli Goldratt’s concept of “inherent simplicity.” Inherent Simplicity tells us that any part of reality is governed by very few elements and that any existing conflict can be eliminated. If we take that as a given, as absolutely correct in every situation, we'll find ourselves thinking clearly.
These factors provide guidance for teams to choose effective practices for their situation while abiding by the constraints the organization has put on teams in how to collaborate with each other.
Symptoms of not doing this: teams will run experiments and talk about “failing fast” in deciding how to work.
4. Teams must be able to self-manage within a consistent way of working across an organization
Amplio provides a way to specify a consistent way of working across teams while enabling teams to be able to self-manage. This requires specifying organization-wide agreements while allowing teams to decide on their own practices while they meet them.
These create the context within which teams work, giving them the freedom to use first principles to decide how they work. While people must follow core principles of knowledge work, Amplio has no pre-ordained practices since none are universal.
Amplio provides the ability to create an adaptive framework that provides a well-defined way of working while adapting to changes as needed.
Symptoms of not doing this: Little consistency in how people work together and teams being forced to use practices that don’t suit them.
5. Adoption / Transition Flexibility
Amplio can adjust the pace and depth of adoption from slow to quick and from being preset to being more tailored. This is important because different rates and depths of adoption are needed in different cultures. ?Amplio has a transition model based on William Bridges’s “Managing Transitions” and the Heath Brothers’ “Make it Stick.”
The benefit of this, combined with the ability to tailor the workflow, is that people can start with a fit-for-purpose solution. This is more effective and avoids a significant amount of resistance that would be otherwise generated.
Amplio provides ways to start as easily as Scrum or in a more tailored manner.
Symptoms of not doing this: Resistance to and stagnation of adoptions.
6. Practices provided
Amplio has a few practices that have been demonstrated to be useful, if not essential, but which are missing in the popular Agile frameworks. These include using the generic value stream to create an improvement backlog, minimum business increments , using customer journey mapping to decompose deliverables into stories , monthly-quarterly budgeting with flow allocation, a variety of team topologies, and release-driven program increment planning, amongst others.
Different team topologies are presented to allow for proper team organization as well as decoupling value streams as can be done.
Because Amplio provides a way to select from a set of potential practices, it can borrow practices from other methods as well.
Symptoms of not doing this: inefficient working methods, which create a significant amount of waste.
领英推荐
7. Management involvement and preparation
Amplio incorporates both Lean Management and David Marquette’s (from Turn the Ship Around) ?Leader-Leader approach. This has management take an active role in improving the organization by having them focus on improving the environment teams work in. Without this, managers tend to resist change, and teams tend to self-optimize.
Symptoms of not doing this: Management resistant to change.
8. Flexibility of the planning time period.
Teams tend to work best in short cycles ranging from one-day timeboxing to one to two-week sprints. Which way to work usually depends upon the type of work of the teams involved.
Organizations, on the other hand, have a longer planning cycle, typically from one week to three months.
Amplio accommodates these variations. The benefit of this is that the organization can start with a planning horizon that makes sense while improving it as time goes on.
Symptoms of not doing this: Development cycles being longer than they should be. This creates waste.
9. Training/coaching Approach
Training in workshops in full-day sessions is a very ineffective method. Much information is lost and people still have to figure out how to apply it in their workplace. ?Studies have shown that over 85% of information learned in these types of workshops are last after just 2-3 days if they are not immediately used.
Skill improvement workshops (e.g., decomposing releases into stories) should be done on the actual work of the organization.
Conveying new ideas should be able to be done in a flexible manner. At its best it should enable in the workplace learning – not teaching some skill and then trying to apply it later on the job. It should also be done in a way that does not disrupt people’s working schedules significantly.
Short sessions delivered over time allow for the training to be done in the workplace and not the workshop – increasing knowledge uptake.
Conveying knowledge also needs to incorporate validated theories in a way that enables people to relate new practices to their past experiences. This lets them learn faster and understand what they are doing (and why) from the beginning.
Symptoms of not doing this: High training costs with low returns. This also requires more coaching than would otherwise be necessary.
10. Integrated coaching skills
Coaches and consultants need more than just listening and speaking skills. They need to know how people learn and how to avoid creating resistance. They can use systems thinking and take responsibility to avoid blaming those they coach for challenges.
How to do this should be integrated into any offerings.
Symptoms of not doing this: Having a team coach only be able to handle one team.
11. Virtual collaboration boards
Amplio provides several virtual collaboration boards for working, making decisions, and learning. These include:
Working boards
Decision-making boards
Learning boards
Symptoms of not doing this: Slow team learning as well as not using what they’ve learned effectively.
12. Principles of Quality Software If Software Is Involved
The proper techniques for developing software should be adhered to. Proper development methods take less time than poor ones while creating a base of high-quality software to maintain and extend in the future.
Symptoms of not doing this: Poor quality software with high technical debt and expensive testing workload.?
An observation
Not doing the above often results in having a framework based on pre-ordained practices, many of which are not appropriate for the people using them. Because of a lack of understanding by the teams and a lack of appropriateness of the practices, teams eventually abandon these practices. Proponents of frameworks with fixed core practices then tend to blame the people who couldn’t figure out how to use the framework instead of seeing how to make the framework more appropriate and thereby more effective while also being more easily used.
Product | Leadership | Enterprise | Agile Coach
10 个月11. Be a good and empathetic person who has dealt with some of their own personal shortcomings. Knows when to shut up and knows what the clients want. Have the ability to have good “bedside manner” when clients are feeling sick. Understand that not everything can be reduced into concepts and that things get lost in translation/reduction. ———- This is all fine and dandy but you can still end up stuck like Lean did.
At the center of value
10 个月Would you be interested to discuss your approach at our Berlin Business Agility Meetup in April or May? Here‘s the line-up of agnostic topics. We typically meet Tuesdays at 1pm eastern for English sessions: Business Agility Meetup Berlin on Meetup https://meetu.ps/c/4FSbh/f39RT/a
At the center of value
10 个月Strategy alignment can be oriented around covering #unmetneeds so that the organization has a reason to exist in the market in the first place. Do you also support value network analysis and mapping to address the whole system of work including partnerships? Mirko Kleiner
Founder XSCALE Alliance. Author "the agile way".
10 个月I'm working on an article about AI & Agile Alignment. Because, unless it aligns with AI, Agile is obsolete. I've also set up a group to explore methods for this here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/groups/14368386/
THIS IS A PERSONAL ACCOUNT
10 个月All very sensible. Would like to know more about the proposed approach to "Team self-management". In my experience, ambiguous roles and responsibilities is the root cause of many avoidable problems. By all means agree custom roles and responsibilities to make best use of strengths of individuals, AND deliver what you promised. But we cannot have too many cooks in the kitchen, or people cherry picking responsibilities at will.