Storytelling in Agile is a great way to open up a window into how Agile can operate and where you could be in the not-so-distant future.
—Mario Moreira
Once upon a time, there was a company called OnHigh, which was doing Agile. Well, employees weren’t really sure what they were doing, but they were at least following the mechanics of an Agile method. After a couple of years, they were seeing some improvements but not really achieving the outcomes they were looking for. They thought Agile would give them an edge and much more business success.
There were a few enthusiastic and passionate Agilists on some of the teams who kept trying to move the needle toward exploring Agile beyond the mechanics because they were finding that their teams were getting stuck on the mechanics. They proposed exploring the Agile values and principles because they realized that they pretty much jumped into the mechanics of a process without really embracing the values and principles. This helped move the needle a little bit. What they learned was that while most employees responded positively to the principles, some weren’t ready to embrace them, particularly the managers who attended those sessions.
An Agile principle that some people got stuck on was “welcoming changing requirements, even late in development.” Some interpreted “welcoming” as being forced to make the change. After explaining that “welcoming” provides you with the opportunity to hear new ideas and then methodically determine their priority on when and if to do them, most employees firmly agreed with this principle. There was still more to discuss.
Initiating an Open Space Unconference
They decided to use Open Space Technology in an attempt to identify the common Agile-related challenges in delivering customer value. There was a call-out to teams doing Agile to join. The facilitator opened up the space by sharing guiding principles and logistics (Figure 22-1).
Figure 22-1. Executing an Open Space session
Participants posted their topics on the marketplace of ideas. There were enough ideas posted that three break-out timeframes where conducted. At the start of the first break out, participants self-organized around the topic that interested them. Participants could use the Law of Two Feet to move from topic to topic according to their level of interest.
At the end of the timeframe, the facilitator shared the “Evening News.” After three such rounds, the facilitator’s notes were gathered and the session was closed. The report summary was prepared, as illustrated in Figure 22-2.
Figure 22-2. Report summary from Open Space session
This led to a fairly clear conclusion. If the enterprise wanted to gain the business benefits that Agile can bring, it must get serious about a cultural transformation toward Agile. The good news is that there was a senior leader who wanted to become the Agile sponsor. The Agile sponsor allocated money to build a small team of Agile coaches. She brought in one Agile consultant who had enterprise Agile experience and promoted three Agile champions from within the company who were willing to grow further. These coaches called themselves the Agile Advantage Team.
The Increments of an Agile journey
The two principles that drove the Agile Advantage Team were focused on being customer-value-driven and employee-focused. They used these principles as a litmus test for all of the adoption activities they considered. Did the activity move the needle toward customer value and empower employees?
Since the team was small, they took an incremental approach toward adopting Agile. This way, they learned from the results of each increment before they moved ahead, very similar to the Agile approach taken to incrementally build a product. As illustrated in Figure 22-3, they used an adoption approach focusing on learning, growing, accelerating, transforming, and finally sustaining the Agile adoption.
Figure 22-3. Incremental approach toward an Agile adoption
Learn
“Learn” primarily focused on understanding the enterprise’s focus on value, learning about the people (that is, employees), and offering learning (in other words, Agile education), as illustrated in Figure 22-4. This started with a baseline to understand where the enterprise was from an Agile perspective. It incorporated details from the Open Space report summary and was extended to include interviews from key leaders to gauge the enterprise’s focus on customer value and employee engagement.
Figure 22-4. Learning about value and the employees while offering education
Value-based questions focused on how value is measured today and how that value is validated along the way with customer feedback. It also included base-lining existing data such as how long it takes to deliver an idea from the moment it is recorded to when it is released. To learn about the people, employee-based questions focused on levels of collaboration, ownership, motivation, enthusiasm, trust, and safety, with a particular focus on self-organizing teams.
As the coaches were learning about the enterprise, they were providing Agile education primarily focused on readying the minds of those who expressed an interest in Agile. This involved an Agile 101 session of Agile values and principles, what a customer-value-driven enterprise looks like, and an understanding of what the current Agile galaxy looks like for their enterprise (see Chapter 4 for more details).
The results of this increment highlighted that there was little focus on customer value throughout the enterprise. There were a few spots where both Agile and self-organizing teams were understood. Also, lead times for delivering customer value were very long, averaging about 28 months.
Grow
“Grow” is where things got interesting. “Grow” focuses on education and experimentation, as illustrated in Figure 22-5. The assessment provided enough telling data that the company knew that it needed to respond more quickly to the marketplace. The Agile Advantage Team coaches opted to work from a pull model where they would initially provide coaching to teams that were asking for Agile help. They thought that the teams that were showing enthusiasm for Agile were more likely to put more effort into owning their Agile change. Coaching focused on helping teams begin experiments in bounded authority and self-organizing around the work.
Figure 22-5. Growing knowledge of Agile through coaching, education, and experimentation
The Agile Advantage Team coaches also began their own education program focused on helping the enterprise increase customer value through delivering early and often, optimizing the end-to-end flow for faster delivery, enhancing quality through fast feedback loops, increasing employee motivation and ownership, understanding coaching, and learning ways to promote change. They did this in the form of an Agile coaching pathway of education where there were at least 18 Agile and Value, Flow, Quality (VFQ) topics covered over a period of similar weeks. It seemed like a long period, but learning is best achieved over time and enterprise transformation is serious business.
Following the pull model, the Agile Advantage Team coaches initiated periodic Agile meet-ups within the company. All employees could join and it included a specific Agile topic for the first half and a Lean Coffee approach for the second half, where attendees decide the agenda. This helped coaches understand the topics of interest that fed into the Agile adoption effort.
The biggest focus in “Grow” was experimenting with an enterprise idea pipeline model. This involved establishing an enterprise portfolio of ideas and applying a cost of delay (CoD) to understand priority and order of magnitude differences among ideas. This provided visibility to leadership on low-value work being done at the expense of high-value work waiting in the pipeline. Education and experimentation with leadership and chief product owners occurred around a customer-value-driven model so it could be tailored to the specifics of this enterprise. This formed the beginning of a continuous Agile budgeting framework.
Accelerate
Feedback from the “Grow” increment was quite positive. Teams liked that the education wasn’t just focused on process but covered concepts of value, discovery, flow, experimentation, and quality. “Grow” also made it evident that there was more demand for Agile education and coaching. The experiments in “Grow” were not always successful, but the learning helped adapt the use of the idea pipeline and cost of delay. “Accelerate” expanded coaching and experimentation, as illustrated in Figure 22-6.
Figure 22-6. Accelerating the Agile adoption through expanded coaching and more
The pull signals led the Agile Advantage Team coaches to expand coaching with teams and leadership. They also experimented with a more formal education program that focused on employees and teams that wanted further education, again using a pull system. They did this in the form of an Agile practitioner pathway (APP) where there were at least eight topics covered over a period of similar weeks. The topics included the discovery mindset, increasing customer value through delivering early and often, optimizing the end-to-end flow for faster delivery, and enhancing quality through fast feedback loops (for example, VFQ). These pathways used work-based education where, after learning a topic, the cohorts applied the knowledge to their own teams for greater learning, which also advanced the adoption.
The coaches began experiments with story mapping for those engaged teams to improve decomposition and cut increments that bridged the gap between idea at the enterprise level and user stories at the team level. This helped employees better understand the requirements tree from strategy to ideas to increments to epics and user stories. In addition, since the historical data highlighted that many high-value ideas would wait for long periods of time before they got worked on, a value stream mapping experiment was initiated on several product lines to understand the process efficiency. Efforts were then made to eliminate bottlenecks and reduce wait states.
Agile Pit Stop
Experiments in the early stages of your Agile transformation are a good way to find out what works for you and your enterprise.
It became evident that in order to align with customer value, customer feedback was needed along the way. A few of the teams wanted to experiment with customer feedback loops. The coaches were happy to support this experiment applying the customer feedback vision practice (see Chapter 14) to better understand customer personas and where feedback loops may provide the highest-value feedback.
Since there was a decision to continue with the enterprise idea pipeline and cost of delay experiment for the next six months, it was felt that it was prudent to experiment with Agile budgeting (see Chapter 19) to allow a more effective means of aligning to high-value ideas (that is, demand) and adapting supply to meet this demand. Leadership and finance became part of the group that learned and began experimenting with this concept.
Transform
Feedback from “Accelerate” was positive so the enterprise committed to “Transform.” This focused on three increments, as illustrated in Figure 22-7. The first focused on role evolution, scaling coaching, and education for product owners who lead with value, HR engagement, and commitment to Agile across the enterprise. The second focused on leadership education, dependencies across the work, and measures of success. The third focused on scaling education, influencing outside vendors to apply Agile and assessing our state of Agile.
Figure 22-7. Transforming in three stages
Transform One
The first increment of “Transform” started with many teams committing to Agile (bottom-up) and leadership committing to Agile (top-down). This provided a good overall balance of commitment although it was also stated that no one would be forced to become Agile.
Now that there were many people keen on applying Agile, there was a need to scale the coaching. The Agile sponsor agreed to add four more coaches to the Agile Advantage Team. The coaching positions were filled with two external hires and two internal Agile champions. They were educated in a pattern similar to the Agile coaching pathway.
Education was focused on those that had the responsibility of driving customer value, which included product owners and product managers. The product owner pathway focused strongly on understanding the customer with personas, identifying value with cost of delay, challenging assumptions, and establishing customer feedback loops.
Also included was a focus on role evolution as the coaches, management, and teams realized that some roles were already changing (for example, needing product owners, moving from project managers to ScrumMasters, and evolving management’s role). HR realized that it had a role to play in role evolution and the Agile adoption effort in general. HR took part in understanding the elements of embracing employees focused on building trust, learning more about intrinsic motivation, promoting collaboration, and so on. HR also started to realize the importance of building a learning enterprise so it started taking part in understanding the discovery mindset and participating in experiments.
Transform Two
The second increment of “Transform” focused on education for leaders (executives and middle managers), a particular focus on dependency management across teams and ideas, and establishing and operating with success measures. Education for executives and managers focused on a combination of understanding their role in an Agile enterprise, how to support the use of an enterprise idea pipeline, and how to engage with their teams using the language of customer value and capturing feedback.
Agile Pit Stop
Education for executives and managers should focus on understanding their role in an Agile enterprise, how to support the use of an enterprise idea pipeline, and how to engage with their teams using the language of customer value.
As the enterprise idea pipeline was used, it became evident as early as the Record through Refine stages that some of the ideas required effort from multiple teams. This led to promoting lightning-bolt-shaped teams so that a team could work in more than one area. It also led to restructuring some teams to include a more cross-functional set of skills that reduced dependencies on other teams. This started with experiments in both areas with executives and managers adapting as they learned what worked better to reduce cross-team dependencies.
As management played a role in optimizing flow by removing impediments, there was a particular focus on the time it took for an idea to go from the Record stage to the Release stage (that is, lead times). In addition, there was a focus on looking for ways to reduce approvals, hand-offs, waiting, and so on. This also included a strong focus by product owners and teams on decomposition and cutting increments of value from the idea.
Finally, there was a spirited discussion focused on measures of success for getting to customer value. Initial discussions focused on the importance of measuring outcomes over output. This continued with a discussion of having leading indicators since outcomes are lagging measures. Primary measures for getting to customer value included value curves, driving with CoD, customers at demos, customer satisfaction, tracking end-to-end lead times, and customer revenue (the outcome measure). Employee satisfaction was also included. An enterprise dashboard was established as a means to correlate and understand progress, to avoid sub-optimization of over measuring, and to improve decision making.
Transform Three
The third increment of “Transform” focused on scaling education, establishing an assessment that focused on an Agile culture, and influencing outside organizations to align with Agile.
Now that there were many people keen on applying Agile, there was a need to scale the delivery of the education. Since there were a number of local Agile champions within the company, they were leveraged to help co-deliver the Agile practitioner pathway. Most were very enthusiastic as it was their way of giving back to the Agile community. A large number of employees were educated in a relatively short period of time.
As the transformation continued, there was a focus on assessing the Agile culture to gain an understanding if the Agile adoption was leading to a transformation. The Agile Cultural Assessment Survey (see Chapter 5) was used to gauge the current level of the Agile mindset in the enterprise. This was combined with the success measures on the enterprise dashboard (see Chapter 20) to correlate Agile cultural alignment with customer focus. Due to the focus on removing impediments and cutting increments of value, lead times were reduced from the original 28 months down to three months.
It was learned that some of the impediments that were slowing the enterprise was the way outside companies delivered to OnHigh. Often, when something was provided, it would have to be reworked in order to integrate the amount of feedback that was gathered. This led to educating vendors on the Agile mindset and the incremental cadence expected in their work. It also included experimenting with how to work with vendors in less of a time-and-material approach and more of an inspect-and-adapt and incremental approach. This helped further reduce the end-to-end lead times.
Sustain
Transitioning to “Sustain” doesn’t mean you are done focusing on Agile. However, the culture was focused on identifying, validating, and delivering customer value and on teams self-organizing around the work. “Sustain” effectively lasts indefinitely, with peaks and troughs of effort depending on the shifting needs of the enterprise and leadership changes.
As leadership and employees change, there is a continued focus on education and coaching. While levels of coaching support are often less than previous increments, a continued focus on Agile concepts, practices, and mindset remain in place. After a few tweaks to the Agile Cultural Assessment Survey previously mentioned, it was decided that it would be used during the “Sustain” period at least for the next year.
There was also a focus on honing existing concepts and practices as feedback was received on what worked better. This included introducing new concepts and practices focused on bringing higher value to the customer. Figure 22-8 illustrates “Sustain” activities. This will continue for the foreseeable future.
Figure 22-8. Sustaining the Agile transformation
It should be noted that each increment of the Agile adoption that led to an Agile transformation took about six months. Added up, this was more than three years. Transforming an enterprise takes time since it involves a mindset shift and new ways of working. Don’t underestimate the effort.
How Will You Write Your Agile Story?
Now it is time for you to write your Agile story. Is your Agile galaxy comprised of a holistic top-to-bottom and end-to-end view of Agile where everyone is engaged? Are you a customer-value-driven enterprise that emphasizes learning customer value through customer feedback? Are your employees given ownership and do they feel like they really matter?
Imagine that your enterprise focuses on the highest-customer-value work. A place where all of the ideas from strategy down to tasks are transparent and visible so everyone knows if their work is aligned with strategy and high-priority ideas. Where employees use 100% of their brain power to self organize around the work and be trusted to build customer value. Where a discovery mindset wins over certainty thinking. Where managers are leaders, leading people with inspiration, vision, and trust. Where customers embrace the products and services being built because they are engaged in the building of the work all along the way. Imagine!
Now it is time for you to imagine your future. Hopefully, this book has provided you with many cutting-edge Agile concepts, mindsets, practices, and techniques to help you adopt Agile throughout your enterprise. It is time for you to write your Agile story. I hope it is one that captures your journey from idea to delivery and from the team level to the executive level. I wish you the best as you imagine and implement your Agile story.