Why your agile workflow is broken.

You want to deliver phygital products with great user experience at scale?

You jumped the agile band wagon and yet feel stranded in no man's land?

Reading this article will bring you one step closer to being OK.?Find four actionable pieces of advice by an agile practitioner on your journey to unbreak your workflow.

Why you adopted in the first place

Agile helps move faster by reducing idle times through power and decision making distribution. No need to procrastinate on TikTok whilst waiting for the omniscient supervisor to approve of the next step.

Agile unlocks high user centricity and thereby adoption with an iterative, validated approach. No longer will you assume to know everything about your user, but kindly and frequently ask their valuable opinion.

Agile can create a sense of purpose and belonging in employees or better contributors. With great distributed power comes great distributed responsibility but also great satisfaction?with small and big wins.?

Agile will boost your project management abilities: Careful estimates and thorough backlog hygiene allow for close to real-time controlling and status assessment.

Agile is rewarding with a weekly sense of accomplishment in your sprints. You are getting things DONE. Side effect: You will improve at estimating your workload - stay healthy and sane!?

What you experienced in the real world

Agile seduces organisations to optimise solely for speed - a steep burn down curve. At times speed is an antagonist to agility: You may lose sight of the bigger picture - the original value proposition - and deliver a mediocre product.

Agile leads to unexpected potentially unpleasant places: A lack of boundaries and sensible decision making criteria can derail projects.?

Agile is used as an excuse to constantly pivot and never lean into a solution. You may never create the intended value for your customer.

Agile needs rigour, endurance and room for experimentation -? especially the later get’s commonly suffocated by pressing daily business.

Agile imposes new challenges with regards to information architecture: Distribution of power requires you to provide accessible, up-to-date and reliable information - preferably in digestible, well legible chunks.

Agile becomes a flashy label for Watergile: You are still relying on hierarchical structure and centralised power but your employees use a Scrum or Kanban board to note todos. [Hint: you are not there yet]

What you think when hitting rock bottom

Why can’t you just have the good side of the medal? Should you go back to waterfall? Or can you blend the two in a quirky yet functional way? [frankenstein design challenge]

What can you do to mitigate and/or overcome the downsides and side-effects of running Agile projects? We have arrived at the million dollar question.

Why you will hang in

In my opinion Agiles biggest differentiator lies in MittelfreiheitDE aka freedom of means. Value proposition for the customer/user is the ultimate yardstick of decision making. The choice of means to deliver the promised value is secondary. Or in the words of the agile manifesto: “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools !”?

Allowing the freedom of means unlocks divergent thinking, true innovation and the unexpected new.?Living up to this standard comes with distribution of power and decision making.?In order for agile individuals to exercise power empathetically and make “good” decisions one needs to provide accessible and truthful information.

You now have arrived at the slope of enlightenment

Revealing four foundational areas of engagement and how design will contribute to a successful implementation of an Agile practice in your organisation:

[1] Decision making criteria ?? the northstar

When delivering the best possible, joyous products to your customer in a decentralised agile project “good” decision making criteria is imperative. The criteria needs to be both comprehensive, accessible and true to all employees/collaborators.?

Living up to the agile manifesto standards by putting users, interactions and customer collaboration first we need to align our decision making criteria with the value proposition to our user and the overall purpose of the projects. Both value and purpose in their intangible nature are hard to grasp at times. Nevertheless we want them to be the northstar - a guiding principle - in good, decentralised decision making.

Design rushing to the rescue: Making the intangible visible, visually encoding complex information to help find clarity - let’s draw from the designers toolbox to give the northstar a concrete form and visual representation: User journey mapping, User Stories, Stakeholder mappings to name a few methods that result in clear, legible, visual artefacts that help visualise, explain and share a project northstar to a multi disciplinary team.?

In addition to giving the “soft” qualities of a project like value, purpose and emotional experience a legible form, design [information design, data visualisation, visual communication …. ] can help bundle “hard” qualities of a project like real world constraints [time, budget, technical specs, material qualities, lifetime, ….] in digestible formats.?

Both soft and hard side of the project’s northstar guide teams/units in solving their local challenges by defining meaningful, aligned decision making criteria. They choose their metrics accordingly, define what range of values represent a “good” decision. No supervisor needed - just well designed information!?

[2] Information architecture

Conscious and careful implementation of information architecture? is the key to making our new, well designed pieces of? information accessible to all stakeholders. Transparent, accessible and true. Get headstarted by sticking to two basic principles:

[1] “Sufficiency with fidelity”: Provide as little information as possible [sufficiency], whilst staying true to the project's aim [fidelity].

[2] “Single Source of Truth (SSOT)”: Make sure every data element is edited in only one place. No duplicates are allowed. Nevertheless the parent may have plenty of linked children. This way faulty information is avoided? and maintenance is kept minimal.

[3] Processes + Formats?

Sensitively facilitate the decision making process for your teams/units. Do not impose the single solution - help them craft a repeatable process that embodies good criteria definition [see 1], a joyful, concise mechanism of making the actual decision and a thorough documentation routine. Iterating on your processes will make them flourish. Once in full blossom encourage teams to visually share best practices [see 2] with peers. Leverage design to make an enticing flowchart.?Struggling to get started? Give the DACI framework a shot and take it from there.?

[4] Definition of Done

Last but not least on an individual level shaping and evangelising a northstar fosters a joint definition of done. Each team member can make an informed decision when a work package [task/issue] is done in accordance with the overall project's values and aims. Pitfall warning: With a shattered definition of done your project might seemingly “advance” - “issues are burned down” - yet you will ship undesirable outcomes.

Design is your friend

Outrolling and fostering an agile practice in an organisation is a challenge. Leveraging the power of design as a fortifier of an agile practice is strongly advised. It will help take the edge off, make your transition a little smoother and avoid encountering the dark side of agile. [reasons see above]. I would love to see a new function in organisations, that is dedicated to maintain and evangelise a design-backed agile practice. A Chief Northstar Evangelist (CNE) (working title).?

On the author

Jan C. Hillmann-Regett has witnessed and helped shape the Agile transformation of an organisation namely Archimedes Exhibitions first hand. Archimedes Exhibitions a berlin-based science communication agency shipping high-end spatial experiences in the form of interactive exhibitions and brand spaces. Delivering a hybrid product consisting of soft- and hardware made the transformation even juicier as the original manifesto circumnavigates products with a physical dimension. As a professor of product design he integrated and taught agile workflows in interdisciplinary design projects.?