Visualising the Intangible: Using Agile Boards, Roadmaps and OKRs as Radiators of Value, Success and Progress of Agile Coaching and Transformation
Rich Harris
Pivoting Minds, Driving Innovation, Strategy, Flow, Business Growth & Performance the Enterprise Agility Way | OD&D | OCM | LPM | Value Streams |Business & Op Models | Digital Transformation | Continuous Everything
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4 Simple Visual Hacks or Plays | Boards | Murals | Infographics| Show Progress | Show Impact | Show Value
Metrics and Measures of Agile Coaching and Agile Transformation are a bit of a problem child.
How do you prove and radiate the value of your Coaching System or Transition?
As we are a Professional Service and Services are by there nature, are intangible until you experience the Agile Coaching as a Service and the Products/Techniques used to deliver that service to become a company asset aka a Trusted Partner/Adviser – a goal of any good Agile or Enterprise Agility Coach.
"Using a Capability Maturity Model is outmoded and doesn’t work"
Progress isn’t linear, doesn't happen in sequence or stages and doesn't happen straight after Coaching interventions or activities. Humans, teams and organisations simply don’t learn and adapt like that.
"Its more like a Snakes and Ladders Board..."
People move up, take a slide back down when they are allowed to fail fast, recover with some sideways movement, then move back up when the learning has embedded as conscious competence e.g. things we know how to inspect, tackle and adapt to, with our toolkits when we afford others the Psychological Safety.
Pure Metrics
By taking a pure metrics approach, you risk weaponising the data by Managers who will always demand 10% more velocity per sprint over time, to get 100 % utilisation and get through put through the roof at the cost of leaving no time for learning or design spikes for exploration, research or experimentation or the lack of Flow Metrics focuses only on shiny new stuff in Development Value Streams eg New Epics, New Enablers, new Features or Stories at the expense of Continuous Improvement, Maintenace or bug fixes to User Feedback.
Health Assessments
By taking a pure measure of health e.g. a snapshot in time, you risk being all warm and fuzzy and being accused of “not delivering value” as you’re spending too much time with how people feel e.g. being a form of Professional Coach. This is where you will feel the pain of Traditional Management vs a Management 3.0 Style as many organisations have forgotten how to deliver organisational learning journeys and pathways, expecting ready made grads and certificate holders to be silver bullet solutions to pain points and customer problems.
Leading Indicators
By using just “Leading Indicators”, you’ll be jumping the gun, making lots of rose tinted assumptions on how the Team or Org is operating in an immature Agile State i.e. crawling, walking. Siloed data points without the journalism of the what, how and why aka the political drivers, scenarios and levers pulled/squeezed – not just the technical or good practice ones, can get people overexcited or under excited, especially if they are the wrong measures or the even the right measures interpreted wrongly.
Lagging Indicators
By using just “Lagging Indicators”, you'll risk the accumulation of Technical Debt, High-Cost Rework, Team Disengagement from the Continuous Learning/Test and Learn/Exploratory approach of Agile and Agile is rubbish by Manager’s type of stuff.
Observability and Monitoring Tools
"I wish their was an COTS Agile Coaching Tool...anybody want to build one with me!"
By using AI, ML, Observability, DevOps and AIOps in ITSM or SDM, they’ll wonder how the hell you surfaced what they thought they could hide under the covers by massaging the stats. Here you'll risk exposure from your witch craft as you’ve just opened the can of worms - the feedback loops - that nobody wanted open, but did because you believe in better, your relentlessly customer focused, want to Continuously Deliver Value and don’t blame individuals, rather the system of work and from Continuous Inspection, Learning and Adaption.
"This is the rock and the hard place we are in – finding the balancing act/point between Transparency, Accountability, Responsibility, Ethic's and what they want and don't want to hear"
Data is a Great, Non-Political Leveller
Data never lies, or does it, well it depends on how’s it wrangled or manipulated, but if you can provide good raw data, backed up by an event and playback the actions and the cause and effect at a retrospective, then you’re in a politically neutral or impartial and winning Coaching position to grow and develop the people, team/s/ or org.
But Still How do You Prove your Impact - 3 Ways...
Take a pragmatic stance and balance Flow Metrics, with Leading, Lagging, Actual Customer Sentiment and Feedback, Health Assessment and Retrospective Learning Points and
And sadly,
"Data is good, but only when you have 3 or more points to show what happened, when it happened, how and why it happened"
We've become too data obsessed, data driven, but a skill of Agile Coaches, Agile Leaders, Managers and Directors is that they have the empathy, EQ/EI and judgment from hindsight, vision for the future - yes we can rub crystal balls and predict things - as we have seen the conditions for it before.
Make Things Visible, Open and Transparent
"Things are often much simpler than thinking prevails – Visualise it! – the old Lean Big Visual Information Radiator, Infographic, Sketch..."
Visualising, socialising, democratising, and celebrating it on these things called big information radiators takes the surprises out, deweaponising it, descaling emotions and most often the arguments too, leaving only the politics which will become baseless in time because people will have grown, delivery gotten faster, quality will be meeting or exceeding expectations and metrics and measures that matter will prevail like SKU Sales, Revenue/Profit Margin, Sentiment/Loyalty, Share Price Index etc Not Velocity, How many Points or Times we Deploy.
"To do this though, you have to take a principled Agile stance, back yourself and not falter and not go into the minutia, mouse shit, the fine detail, keep focus on the right things, the right way at the right time and speed"
?Getting sucked into the fine detail is okay if your optimising stuff, but if your just doing adoption/starting out, less than 6 - 9 months at it, keep it simple, focus on the bigger picture first and lead them to mastery by letting them crawl and walk first.
So let’s do a bit of self-promotion, self-marketing of you as Agile Coach or your System of Coaching (your Community of Practice/Guild/CoE made up of Agile Coaches, Specialist Coaches, SCM, RTEs, STEs, POs who have eyes and ears to the ground and are the feedback loops for your Responsive Coaching Strategy or Plan – yes you must have one and not just wing it!)
Hack 1 – Use What You’ve Got to Solve Customer Pain Points
JIRA, Trello, Planview, Rally, Wrike, Zoho…what ever Agile Collaboration or Enterprise Agile Planning tool you may have, leverage it and create a Transformation, Coaching or Improvement Backlog and Visualise your progress.
Yes – so simple – yet so poorly done and overlooked.
Create a Kanban Scrum or just a Board.
Set up a simple left to right workflow.
I like using Coaching Items (equivalent of the Overall Backlog).
Shu’ing, (Being/Doing/Following),
Ha’ing, (WIP/Practising) and Ra’ing, (Done/Improvements) etc
for my 4 Columns knowing that in Coaching and Transformation terms:
Sorry to disappoint, but there is 7-12 Dans after a Blackbelt depending on your chosen style of Martial Art!
Create some Status’s…
reflecting the Shu Ha Rai Learning Ladder from Novice/White belt, doing as prescribed by the master, the Agile Model/Framework, practicing and learning (Green), to improving and modifying as a Blackbelt.
If you want a more granular Coaching related set of approach for your value stream work flow or Status’s – then try Permissioning, Showing, Telling, Holding, Embedding and Sustaining eg you’ve handed it over to a Community of Practice to self-regulate and own.
Try colour coding the tickets/cards…White/Green/Black – if you have to RAG them if that’s what resonates best – Red/Shu’ing, Amber/Ha’ing, Green/Ra’ing – but make sure you let them know, this is poor reflection of how things actually work and most highly likely the actual state of play.
The idea however is to visualise/show how you’ve taken people, teams and the org on a journey from crawling, to walking, running or flying.
Do this by having Enablers, Epics or just Items like:
领英推荐
Simple, high value, big tickets so they can see your “Quick Wins” or “Low Hanging Fruit” in their terms.
Lots of people moan about the out of the box SAFe Implementation Roadmap, but its goal based approach proves this point really well to Business Leaders about what you’ve been doing.
Maybe add an Epic/Story/Feature Burndown Chart for each Line of Business/Team/Dept etc on the Dashboard.
Or you can even configure widget t show how people attended, adding a data point.
You can the use this for water cooler, tea room, corridor chats, full on Agile Conversations and at Agile Transformation Board Meetings without your executive sponsors.
Just avoid using the Roadmap – Gannt Chart like in the image above, this is unhelpful as you will be pinned to dates/timelines, we are not doing or being Agile Coaches to run a project, but to change cultures, change behaviours and affect the organisational DNA so escape delivery management for transformation.
Hack 2 – Use a Digital Workspace/Whiteboard Tool
Decouple it even further from EAP tools and use a digital workspace tool like Mural or a Surface Hubs - those expensive, under used assets that stay switched off a lot of the time – perfect digital billboards to advertise on and there’s bunch of apps via Teams or Microsoft Store you can use on them.
Mural for instance, allows you to capture ideas from discovery activities and Gemba Walks and Observations.
You can then visualise it using a predefined template or make your own priority maps, roadmaps etc – and use colours to show done, doing, next to reach the target, showing your Kanban - Billboard/Sign Posting/Visual Info or what I call self-marketing skills.
Just avoid the sequencing templates that show A, to B to C keeping away from linear plotting, even use Bubble Maps, Radars or Scattergrams as its about joining the dots of a whole system, not optimising a little part that make the biggest bang for their bucks!
Then do celebration events and activate your progress, value, and success at scale, on a webinar, a donut morning with coffee and capture chat, feedback and polls and annotate the “mural” with anecdotal, qualitative feedback - adding social proof.
If that doesn’t get your points up – then just bribe them with Gift Cards, a Team Lunch or buy yourself some Rating and Reviews, seems all the big eTailers are at it!
Hack 3 – Use a Goal Based or Rolling Wave Roadmap
Like previously mentioned, experiment using a Roadmap format. Above is 3 Goal Based examples – see how they are nothing like a gantt chart and show the curves in the road and are not liner 45 degree lines, but all show a route to that Northstar Vision.
Here is a Rolling Wave example:
The point to this one is things are never done, even though you have “deployed” the capability, its never BAU and will always need ongoing support and attention of the System of Coaching to make it stick/become embedded as part of the Org and personal DNA of people and teams to stop the chocks from coming out and bad habits creeping back in.
A goal-based roadmap is the best one of them all, you work with your Sponsors, they reveal what they want to see, where the change should happen, you dove tail it with your Subject Matter Expertise as Coach to be comfortable you can achieve that and build it out.
Then you have the right to chop and change it as needed, avoiding the Gannt chart following a plan bullocks.
What might some of your goal or capabilities look like human readable/understandable words:
Refine and align it the Strategic Vision, your SME Know How, Judgement and Instinct, along with any of your Assessment Data and Responsively Build Capabilities aligned to Business and Market Demand/Needs against a Big Picture of the Honey Pot/Northstar.
"Avoid the big-name tools – their Roadmaps just look like Gannt Charts and Bar Charts – try speaking to your Design Studio Team or if you have a Cartoonist or Visual Sketcher, go creative and get some abstraction in or play with Visio, Lucid Chart even PPT has great infographic template to manipulate"
Anything is better than going anywhere near a linear chart giving any kind of hope or sniff towards Traditional Project or Management approaches, heck use a Use a Kanban Board with Up Next, Doing, Half 1, Half 2, Year 2, Year 3 which is another form of rolling wave road mapping.
Another way to do this is using an infographic like a downwards or upwards DNA helix as a metaphor for change to Lean Agile Ways of Working and the Digital DNA we want to embed – showing what you’ve done, add two things coming and then leave the rest blank to create curiosity, engagement, questions, and anticipation. Apply it to a wall, allow people to add comments, stick notes to provide anonymised feedback and ideas and cries for help they are too embarrassed to ask for – giving everyone a voice.
Again, this avoids the upfront, preloaded plan and allows you to respond to change/need/markets/appetite – remember, we are Agile – not linear, sequenced, but overlapping, spiralled, intersecting and crossing over.
Hack 4 – Use OKRs
Yeah, a 1970’s growth hack idea!
If your accused of being too big picture outcomes focused and not output focused/granular/detailed enough, then OKRs are great way to satisfy senior leaders/sponsors executives with a bit more on how your value/impact will be felt and attributed to the successes of the Team/Org.
In your first iteration, try to stay as high level on your KRAs as possible. Why – it’s really hard to get the KPI, OLA, SLA, & uplift or waste reduction data to prove them, so you will get entangled in spending all your time trying to prove them instead of doing them - so set them as goal or targets.
The way around this is of course use an OKR tool or Platform.
GTMHub is a great tool to track and adjust your OKRs, there is others too, including free ones like What Matters or but this one too me is the best as it has a huge array of integrations via its API to collect data, but you can use PPT, Excel, Word Table too and display on those Surface Hubs, so don’t be restricted or confined, start simple, and grow when people ask for more, that way your embedding the use of OKRs and not making it another process to complete.
So in Hacks 1-3 we really got the Goal/Objective/Capability parts nailed.
Now to get beneath the surface a bit further, lets focus on the Key Result Areas.
"Lets look at the Goal of Building Quality In to create the shortest possible lead time for development and delivery"
How can we decompose, slice it up to show how we have shown, told, taught, mentored coached in quality standards?
Here is a Quality Strategy in KRAs:
Like I said, don’t go into the uplifts of 10% or dollar value or cost reductions first off, a) that’s not your job – that’s the outcome/impact for the team/s to pursue, albeit your effort are attributable to that performance, b) you wont them to own it, use it and ask for more i.e. engagement not lip service and c) the key is not to get distracted into Drucker’s Management by Numbers measure by activity game and d) stay a-political, independent, bi partisan, unbiased as Coach – facilitate don’t dictate – leave that to them - give them the tools - let them leverage it via your guidance, powerful questioning, stories and insights and leave the door open to EAs to come and say - do you know any tools that will help us grow this capability.
An Alternative Way from Strategyzer
Here is a great Board from the gang at Strategyzer from thier Testing Business Ideas Book and Worshops.
You could use/adapt this approach if who you're working with an Organisation open to Testing and Learning, the Lean Start Up process and Coaching as Service whereby you can upfront decide a number of specific Coaching interventions e.g. Hypothesises to Coach, Mentor, Advise, Guide, Facilitate on or Show, Tell, Hold, Embed.
I just saw it and though, yeah I could adapt that as a low Tech option for a Team Wall.
What I also like is the rough approach to progress, like T Shirt sizing, its good enough, wihtout being precise and wasting effort and time and ultimately if the product is right, feedback and the revenue in the products value stream will speak for itself
Conclusion
I believe in starting like you mean to finish and use Lean Agile and Digital ways to do it, setting the tone as a role model of what we do, showing your authenticity and to practice what you preach.
So there you have it, 4 Hacks or Plays to visualise, showcase, celebrate and prove your worth/value.
If your game – why not combine your OKRs onto a Goal Based Roadmap/Infographic and show how your Portfolio is aligned to Organisational Strategy Initiatives and how the programmes and teams support those Value Streams.
Remember – it all about customer value via products, services, platforms, and experiences not internally facing projects! and you only get there by taking a whole Digital Ecosystem perspective, not one team in IT doing Scrum one metric making or breaking it and both ITIL v3/v4 and SAFe have come up with some great measures and metrics as baselines to copy or adapt for product, service, solution and portfolio management.
Good luck!