What Your Enterprise Agility Has in Common with U.S. Navy Ships
Elizabeth Woodward
Building World-Class Emerging Tech in AI & Cloud; Driving Innovation, Performance & Social Impact
U.S. Navy ships have a problem and, odds are, your enterprise has the same problem. The problem is barnacles. Barnacles are typically very small crustaceans with tough calcite shells that float along freely as juveniles until they find something—a rock, a crab, a Navy ship, etc.—to latch onto using their superglue bio-adhesive. Then, they hang around for a good 5-10 years.
How can something so tiny be a problem for a huge Navy ship? It turns out that barnacles can add more than 60 percent drag which increases fuel consumption by 40 percent.
Similarly, business process barnacles add significant drag to enterprise performance.
As enterprises embrace agile methods, teams within those enterprises bump up against highly un-agile processes, such as legal processes that take months to protect IP, business phase-gate processes that require all requirements up-front or client engagement processes that take longer than a two-week development cycle. To become more agile, enterprises must change a mountain of complex processes, associated practices and templates.
The significant challenge in transforming an enterprise’s traditional processes to those that support greater organizational agility is in removing embedded, superglued process barnacles that have accumulated over time.
What happens in most large-scale enterprises is that a process is born to help optimize a single, focused business problem—the executive leadership team wants to ensure that they are making good business decisions at certain checkpoints or they want to make sure that the goods and services meet quality standards so that customers will be happy.
Mandatory processes are very attractive mechanisms through which subsequent initiative owners can deploy activities, tasks, templates, response forms and more required to support their initiatives. Often each change is very small—a few extra questions to ensure that a team is following a required approach, clicking a button to confirm understanding or completing a form that applies to a subset of projects.
Over time, initiatives fade, technology changes, business focus shifts, yet the related process barnacles stick primarily because it can be difficult to determine what might be impacted by removing them, who might be offended by removing them, or how much effort is required to remove them. Naturally, teams often find creative ways to deal with the barnacles.
Executives in successful agile enterprises work very hard to not only scrape the process barnacles from the hull of their enterprise, but to support their teams in preventing additional ones from forming in the first place. It may not be the most glamorous work, but it is essential for enabling and optimizing agility.
What process barnacles have you encountered in your efforts to embrace agile at scale?
Software Product Manager / Product Marketing Manager - ex IBM - Rational Software - Hewlett Packard
7 年Nice analogy. I find process barnacles are especially hard to scrape off if program management infrastructure (people, processes and job descriptions) have built up over the years. It reminds me of when you are writing a small survey to find out what your customers care about. I often ask myself a basic question. "What am I going to do differently if I ask this question and the result is X?" If I'm not going to change anything I will often remove the question. We need to ask similar questions about processes that have manifested themselves over time, especially when moving from on-premise to cloud based software development. There are new more important metrics and data available that may be much more business critical than other process issues. And new ways to implement them that are less invasive and more automated.
Veeam Software Territory Manager, SLED - MA, ME, NH & VT
7 年Brilliant! Outstanding concept, and use of easily visualized analogy! So many business process barnacles still in place via inertia.... could become a cult word for outdated, moldy business processes!! Banish the barnacles!