Seeing the “Big and Small” Pictures

It took me a while to figure out how I wanted to write this post. Here’s my disclaimer, I don’t see the “big” and “small” pictures at the same time. As an Agilist, most of my time is spent on the team and optimizing their ability to create value without much focus on optimizing the organization’s value creation. I hope I’m not alone in this, I’m just being transparent.

Agile frameworks are based on human interactions and about unleashing the creative energy needed to solve complex problems. I saw a post in my LinkedIn feed this week that spoke to the “check the block” anti-pattern teams develop and that caused me to question where my focus is when talking about agility. I was also in a conversation with a colleague about delivery delay and tact time which fed into my “big” and “small” picture reflection.

In my opinion, Agile coaches are most valuable when they see the entire picture and have conversations with people throughout the organization across business functions. This is time consuming and may appear wasteful, but it can unlock insights regarding where bottle necks are created as well as where fear is seated. Building trust through the conversations is a key to developing understanding.

One team’s “small picture” impacts another team’s “small picture” which impacts the enterprise’s “big picture”. For example, if a product or service is fund on a per project basis, then there may be a long lead time created for enhancements, new features or expanded capacity to be brought online. In speaking with my teammate, I said that we’re optimizing our processes at the team level, yet our work-in-progress backlog is growing because we haven’t optimized the entire delivery pipeline; “small picture” focus.

If we shifted from funding projects to funding value streams we could see an increase in overall flow and faster delivery of product or service. This requires “big picture” focus to look across the organization and bring the upstream and downstream teams into alignment in delivering timely value through the improved product or service. There is more detail behind this concept, but that’s for a different post.

I’ve been learning to discipline myself to understand, not just the “big” and “small” picture, but the entire picture. This is beyond looking at the enterprise and optimizing the whole to looking at interactions between people and enterprises; north, south, east, and west. I haven’t settled on a name for this approach, its something like “total picture”, “whole picture” or maybe “ecosystems picture”. I’ll post more on this topic in the coming weeks.

For now, I would encourage conversations to look at both the “big and small pictures,” seek ways to optimize flow through entire value streams while building team, and enterprise trust across teams. 

#Agile #Scrum #SAFe #XP #Kanban #Lean #Flow