There have been many times in Southwest Airlines history where times were great. However, there are other times Southwest refers to as “existential moments” where the outcomes were not obvious and the company was forever changed because of it. These are the defining moments in a company’s history and have ultimately helped shape the industry of air travel. From 9/11, selling tickets online in 1995, fuel hedging in the early 1990s, to the very beginning with Herb going to the Texas Supreme Court to begin flying, and creating the Ten Minute Turn in the early 1970s, Southwest has met and overcome various challenges with innovative techniques coming from passionate Employees and fearless Leadership.
Historically at Southwest, the tough times focus around the core values of the organization: Warrior Spirit, Servant Leadership, and a Fun-Luving Attitude. Focused initiatives and dedicated Teams are created to deliver on key projects… Agile-like. Strategies and decisions are focused on revenue in the most fundamental ways. Innovation comes within empowered core Teams. As we move through undoubtedly one of the most unprecedented crisis, how can the practices we learned from the Agile Teams strengthen Southwest’s ability to adapt once again?
Watch this video to explore how Southwest Airlines’ core values and agility enabled their teams to come together during times of crisis and work towards the same goal.
About Emily Beatty | Strategist @ Southwest Airlines Emily Beatty has been in the airline industry with Southwest for nearly 10 years. During that time, she’s focused her career around the Customer in both the commercial and operational areas of the business. Throughout that journey, there have been many changes in the industry as well as internal to Southwest that she has witnessed and played a role in. Being a part of those critical functions, she’s seen the industry evolve and adapt in ways that are seemingly unpredictable. Some changes come from external pressures or internal goals, yet both result in the need for innovative thinking and fast-moving delivery.
In her current role, she is the strategist of a pilot improving the digital space using agile methods within the booking flow. Her expertise has led her to this opportunity where the Customer is the focus, and she’s able to pull together strategic plans and backlogs around those Customer insights. Prior to this, Emily led an internal Team and managed key relationships with external partners where it was critical to understand both how the product functions from an operational perspective and profitability perspective.
The yearlong pilot recently proved itself as a highly successful program. She now sits on an Agile Leadership Transformation Team to help extend agile within the Marketing Department, to strengthen the relationship between the business and technology. The ultimate goal of the Team is to determine how best to implement Agile in certain focus areas of the business to create a sustainable platform for growth.
Emily brings a unique perspective on what it means to adapt Agile to meet the demands of the business, while listening to your Customers for every step in the journey and determining the next best thing. Her proven track record of developing successful Customer initiatives using strategic visions, Customer data, and high functioning Teams is well established at Southwest. It’s no doubt that 2020 has created unprecedented challenges, and the ability to move quickly and make decisions remains paramount.
About David Hawks | Founder and Chief Agilist @ Agile Velocity Founder and Chief Agilist of Agile Velocity, David Hawks is a Certified Enterprise Coach and Certified Scrum Trainer who is passionate about helping organizations achieve true agility beyond the basic implementation of Agile practices.
David’s primary focus is to guide leaders through their Agile transformation by helping to create successful transformation strategies and effectively manage organizational change with a focus on achieving real business results.
We’d wager most people think of coaches in the context of sports – Vince Lombardi, Phil Jackson and Pat Summit. These are some of the greatest coaches in the history of sports, but coaches exist in every profession. Simply put, a coach (in any context) helps people, teams, and organizations perform better.
The same is true for Agile Velocity (AV) Coaches. AV Agile coaches help organizations by accelerating their adoption of Agile methods in order to better achieve their business objectives. Coaches use Path To Agility® to prioritize the business outcomes, identify, and coach to build the capabilities necessary to enable those results.
Agile Coaching to Levels
Building new capabilities is hard. It takes time and it will be met with resistance. Having a consistent, repeatable, proven approach is how AV Agile Coaches are able to get results. The Path to Agility® breaks down a business into three levels, each of which has a set of capabilities to master in order to achieve the targeted business outcomes. They are responsible for working with leaders, teams, and individuals at all three levels to instill the desired capabilities. They focus on business results, not just process change.
Following are the three business levels along with the key results our coaches are working towards:
Organization – Leadership develops a modern mindset, increases visibility throughout the organization, and creates alignment around vision, goals, and measured success for sustainable organizational change.
System – Networks of teams are coordinating and collaborating to address dependencies and reduce the time to market.
Team – Teams successfully take on new roles, establish Agile team practices, increase engagement, learn faster, and can predictably produce value.
Agile Coaching For Growth and Results
Although the primary goal of an Agile coach is singular, to improve performance, there are many functions a coach performs on an engagement. The following highlights a handful of these. (For a deeper dive, see 7 Roles of an Agile Coach – Besides Agile Coach.)
Observer
Teacher
Partner
Facilitator
Advisor/Mentor
Coach
As you can tell, AV Coaches aren’t just expected to be expert Agilists, they’re also expected to be well-rounded, growth-minded leaders. Our Agile Coaches are leaders that can have hard, honest conversations as well as listen with compassion. Leaders that can share knowledge and impart wisdom from their experience. Leaders, at their core, that want to help others improve, because they are coaches.
Ready to Improve?
At Agile Velocity, each of our coaches’ job is to work themselves out of a job. They do this by establishing core capabilities at all levels of an organization — making the organization self-sufficient and resilient. Our approach greatly improves the likelihood of long-term success.
When you’re ready to improve your organization’s performance by focusing on business outcomes like increased revenue, customer satisfaction, and speed of delivery, our coaches will be prepared with a solution tailored to your unique needs and desired business results.
My previous post focused on the Harvard Business Review (HBR) article “The Agile C-Suite”1.
In the Forbes article “Agile Isn’t New: What’s New Is The C-Suite Embracing It”2, Steve Denning provides his own perspective on the HBR article, as well as additional insights that help get readers closer to embracing the realities of shifting toward agility.
The title sets up the obvious–Agile isn’t new, but having C-suite level executives embrace it is. That is largely due to how the Agile movement got started and where the vast majority of emphasis has been over the years–on IT and/or Software Development teams. This myopic view of Agile has been an impediment to organizational and business adoption.
I particularly appreciate that Denning starts off by taking an “Economic” view of agility in the C-Suite, by comparing stock performance.
According to Denning, Amazon has been successful, in part, because of Jeff Bezos’ understanding of market position, combined with a focus on customer value. Microsoft’s Agile success was initially a grass-roots movement that grew and then became institutionalized after Satya Nadella became CEO.
By contrast, GE and IBM have very different trends in terms of market capitalization. In IBM’s case, their focus on shareholder value is at odds with their underlying fundamentals and decision-making.
I’ve been saying for years that Agile has always been more about enabling an adaptive business, with a focus on the customer and value optimization, not just about developing software. However, because of its deep IT/software roots, that has been obscured. We have certainly begun to see a shift in recent years and one key lagging indicator of that shift is executive leadership embracing Agile as a business imperative. Likewise, the latest trend and emphasis on “Business Agility” is nothing new. It’s just that we’re finally starting to see real evidence that we’ve “crossed the chasm” of Agile for IT only and have figured out how to position it in a way that makes sense to business leaders.
Denning’s Laws of Agile
In his assessment of the HBR article, Denning suggests that “Agility begins at the top, is inspired by the top, and is embodied in how the top conducts itself.” He goes on to state that “The starting point of agility is the passionate, and even obsessional, pursuit of a crystal-clear mission of the organization. In the case of the private sector, this is value for customers”, what he calls “The Law of the Customer”.
I agree. The first responsibility of leadership is to define and articulate the Vision–compelling purpose–for why we do what we do and why we would be embarking on an Agile transformation or another challenging change initiative. Focusing on the Customer is a key pillar of Agile. Our Path to Agility®framework is a Business Outcomes-based approach. My ‘favorite’ Business Outcome to focus on is Customer Satisfaction, which is described and measured as Customers are satisfied with the experience, benefits, and outcomes when using your product or service.
Denning also references the “Law of the Small Team”, which means “unleashing the creativity of the staff by breaking the work into small pieces that can be handled by small self-organizing teams, working in short cycles with direct feedback from customers” and the “Law of the Network”, which addresses C-Suite leadership’s “responsibility to establish and maintain a hierarchy of competence rather than a bureaucratic hierarchy of authority ” and to “ensure that information flows horizontally to wherever it is needed, not just vertically, and to create an atmosphere of transparency where problems are aired and discussed openly”.
A common refrain amongst agilists is that we need small, self-organizing teams. While that sounds obvious, it’s actually complex. Traditional organizational structures and years of resource utilization emphasis make this difficult to change and sustain. Then there’s the cultural aspect of self-organization, which is in competition with traditional command and control cultures.
For these reasons, I strongly advocate for cultural awareness as the critical starting point for leaders. If leaders aren’t able to understand their organization’s cultural profile, as well as the dynamics of culture and change, then they will be more likely to see the organization struggle and create more churn than progress.
Next, I emphasize the need for distributed decision making. This gets us beyond the base principle of self-organizing teams to address the points at which critical decisions need to be made on a regular basis. Experience has taught us that those who are closest to the situation are most likely in the best position to decide how to deal with it.
So understanding and enabling the “network” is a key to sustainable agility. We address this in Path to Agility by building the capability to understand and address the impact to organizational structure (new roles, team design, management structure, hierarchies, etc.) and to get teams aligned to value streams that are cross-functional and can minimize dependencies and handoffs.
What does it mean to “Embrace” Agile?
Denning continues by stating, “One of the most difficult things for the C-suite to grasp about agility is that it involves a different way of thinking as much as a different way of doing.”
I don’t think that executive leaders don’t “grasp” agility as a mindset, but that they often treat it as something that needs to be implemented. It’s thought of as transactional. As such, too much emphasis goes into doing agile and little into ‘being agile’ or thinking about what agility means across the organization. Leaders commonly think it’s something for the teams to do. Accepting it as a mindset that has to be internalized is much less straightforward. There can be a lot of anxiety and discomfort when it comes to thinking differently, versus just doing something differently.
Truly embracing Agile is so much more than just sponsoring or funding an Agile transformation. I’ve seen this play out a few times before. Two instances, in particular, stand out where Agile was compartmentalized, hindering adoption.
In the early stages of an Agile transformation for Company “A”, I was working with C-Suite leadership, as well as their direct reports. I was coaching leadership on how to think about and communicate the intent and prioritization for their Agile transformation. I noticed early on that, during his weekly leadership team meetings, the CIO would make the statement that “Agile is just another tool in our toolbox”. After hearing him make this statement multiple times over the next few weeks, I spoke up. I respectfully challenged the statement and encouraged everyone to think about it as a “strategic capability”. That proved to be the beginning of the end of my coaching relationship with him. It turns out, some leaders don’t like being called out in public (who knew?). Once the CIO showed that he didn’t really embrace Agile, most of his leadership team began to dismiss it as well, and their Agile transformation inevitably failed.
About a year later, I was kicking off a new engagement at Company “B” and had my first introduction meeting with the CIO and his team. During that initial meeting, he made the exact same comment, that “Agile is just another tool in our toolbox”. I couldn’t help but wonder–Was there some article in CIO magazine that used this phrase? Having learned my lesson in the earlier scenario, I did not publicly challenge this CIO. I waited and asked him about it in private. Again, I encouraged him to think about Agile in more strategic terms rather than as “a tool”. I was hopeful that, in this case, it would not be a precursor for another failed Agile transformation. Ultimately, same mindset, same result.
In both of these examples, the companies never reached a level of sustainable, organizational agility. They both plateaued, with a few pockets of Agile teams, and eventually retreated back to the way things had always been done.
For both companies, the lack of C-Suite leadership ‘embrace’ of Agile as a strategic business imperative, was compounded by a form of complacency. They were highly profitable and had little perceived threat from competitors. This is what Dave Snowden refers to as the Apex Predator theory, which relates to a period of stability or dominance, but when instability or uncertainty occurs things get problematic. When things are going well, there’s often no motivation for leaders to think about being adaptive. For most of us, we were likely much more confident, or complacent, in January 2020 than we were in March 2020. Things can change quickly and on a massive scale.
Dave Snowden, Cognitive Edge3
Resilience
“We value Responding to Change over following the Plan” – Agile Manifesto4
There are two ways an organization can choose to respond to change:
Resist–Attempting to prevent external influence, building boundaries, and control systems
Adapt–Generating the appropriate response required for balance, emphasizing distributed decision-making, and self-organization where needed
Robustness and resilience are general characteristics of self-organizing systems through their capacity to resist change and their capacity to adapt to it.
To paraphrase Dave Snowden–moving from an organization designed for robustness to one designed for resilience represents a significant strategic shift. Most organizations have been designed to be robust, to prevent failure, which actually increases complexity. A resilient organization accepts that failure is inevitable and focuses on frequent, early discovery, and adaptiveness in order to quickly recover.
To highlight this, I took a look at the year-to-date stock trends for Amazon, Microsoft, GE, and IBM, since Denning had established that as an indicator. Each of them took a significant dip when the Covid-19 crisis ramped up in March, but both Amazon and Microsoft have shown the ability to rebound rather well, while GE and IBM remain below pre-covid-19 prices.
I did a similar comparison for Company “A” referenced in the example above. (Company “B” is not publicly traded)
Company “A”’s stock price trend–3 years and year-to-date:
Looking at these stock price trends amplifies the shift from robust to resilient. Seeing a growth in stock price, as market share or revenue increase is expected. Resilience is needed when markets shift or become uncertain, as we have now, and the ability to detect threats and adapt or recover quickly. *Of course, there are multiple variables relating to stock price and Agile is at best a correlation and not a causation.
Coming back to ‘Why’
I believe the real compelling purpose for organizational agility is to build resilience. Organizations are less resilient when C-Suite, and all other leaders, don’t truly embrace an Agile mindset.
Why? Because everyone else in the organization will behave as they see their leaders behave. It’s critical for leaders to model the behaviors and mindsets that they expect to see in their people.
Denning frames this quite effectively–“These different ways of thinking, perceiving and acting in turn generate characteristic attitudes, values, modes of thought and approaches to problems…. In effect, the Agile mindset reflects the emergence of a fundamentally different kind of management.”
I appreciate that both the Denning and Bain articles point out the need for leadership humility and managers as coaches. As a Coach, I try to lead with humility and curiosity. I coach leaders to do the same. Modeling that behavior for the rest of the organization shows they are actually embracing an Agile mindset and significantly improves the opportunity for sustained agility.
So, that’s the challenge–Are leaders willing to go through their own transformation in order for the rest of the organization to transform?
If the threat is strong enough, I expect the majority would accept the challenge. It may be obvious today, given the global pandemic-driven economic crisis. Although, counterintuitively, the overwhelming reaction I’ve seen in times of market uncertainty or volatility is for Leaders and organizations to abandon Agile mindset and principles and retreat to old thinking. This is a resistant reaction.
If you’re a C-Suite leader, who really embraces an Agile mindset, then you’ll inherently double-down on the things that enable adaptiveness, rather than abandoning them.
Are you viewing Agile as “just another tool in the toolbox” or is it your strategic, survival guide?
The eagerly anticipated 14th Annual State of Agile Report was published earlier this week, and like previous publications, there are some fantastic insights. With over 1,100 responses collected from August to December 2019, there appears to be good representation from organizations of various sizes as well as an increase in global representation in the survey.
Benefits of Agile
The top benefits of adopting Agile in this report are fairly consistent with recent years. The respondents stated by using Agile approaches, they’ve seen greater ability to manage changing priorities, increased project visibility, higher alignment between IT and the business, faster delivery speed/time to market, and increased team morale. These benefits align nicely with the reasons the respondents indicated when asked why they wanted to adopt Agile–acceleration of software delivery, enhancing the ability to manage changing priorities, increasing productivity, and improving alignment between IT and business.
Digging Deeper into Some Stats
A few statistics stood out, which could highlight some potential areas of opportunity, including:
51% of respondents said either all their teams or more than half of their teams use Agile. While there is significant usage in half of the organizations in the survey, the other half could have a way to go for adoption.
84% of respondents stated they were “below a high level of competency” with Agile practices (consisting of 54% stating they use some Agile practices but are still maturing, 20% experimenting with Agile, and 10% of either considering Agile or no Agile initiatives). There appears to be opportunities to mature practices at most organizations.
The top two areas in organizations where Agile is prevalent is in software development (37% of respondents) and information technology (26%). With two-thirds of efforts in software or IT, there appears to be an opportunity to incorporate other parts of the organization.
Rate of Adoption – A Decade(ish) Comparison
Looking back to the 2011 survey, at that time, 39% of respondents said that either all teams or more than half of teams use Agile. Compared to 51% in 2020, there was an increase of 12% over nearly a decade. Interestingly, over the last three years, this statistic has hovered consistently around the 50% mark.
There are two interpretations of this statistic. From a glass half-full perspective, consider the progress made adopting Agile, especially since the Manifesto in 2001. Agile has made major in-roads in how half of the organizations surveyed deliver value to their customers.
From a glass half-empty viewpoint, look how much further there is to go. Half the companies have scratched the surface (or in their infancy) with Agile, leaving a potential upside opportunity. This leads to two possible questions:
Is this a reasonable rate of adoption, especially when the world is under high degrees of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA)?
Even though there is an uptick in adoption, what evidence do we have that we are adopting Agile well?
Team Level Practices Still Dominate
What is a little more sobering is the number of organizations (54% of the respondents) who indicated that they use some Agile practices, but are still maturing.
Diving deeper into the Agile practices the respondents stated they used, these practices appear to be mostly at the team level. Some of the top practices include holding Daily Standups, Retrospectives, Sprint/Iteration Planning, and Sprint/Iteration Reviews.
While this is nice progress, there may be limitations in the overall impact Agile may have for an organization if only team-level practices are emphasized (or worse, over-emphasized). Because the respondents indicated that Agile is primarily used in software development and information technology, there could be a compounding impact (i.e. team-level focus in a just a subsection of a company) that may be hurting the overall adoption and application of Agile. It’s not necessarily adoption that’s important–instead, it’s how Agile can be used effectively to help an organization achieve its goals.
With the predominant practices implemented primarily among teams, another question arises: what about thinking of the organization from a systems (or holistic, end-to-end) perspective, where an idea for a product or service comes in from a customer and then is delivered out the other side?
Going Beyond “The Team” Focus
Imagine how much more an entire organization might be able to reap the benefits of agility if they were greater aligned beyond the team-level in only information technology or software. With only 16% stating that they were at high levels of competency with Agile, there appears to be much opportunity in the remaining 84%.
McKinsey’s study in conjunction with Scrum.org found when an entire organization operates with an agility mindset, operational performance increases by 30-50%, financial performance improves by 20-30%, employee engagement increases by 20-30 points, and customer satisfaction improves by 10-30 points.
So, while helping teams is good (and a necessary prerequisite for scaling), look at implementing an agility mindset at the system and organizational levels to achieve greater benefits for the entire organization. This is why Path to Agility our Agile transformation framework is split into multiple levels (Team, System, and Organization). Distinctly specifying actions to take at each of these levels helps enforce that a holistic approach is needed to establish higher levels of agility in order to achieve overarching business outcomes.
In this SAFe® Agile transformation webinar recording, Mapping Business Outcomes to SAFe, Mike Hall, Senior Agile Coach and SPC5, discusses how to ensure your SAFe transformation achieves desired business outcomes. Watch the video to discover the missing “connective tissue” that ties your business objectives to the underlying framework.
A free, 1-hour webinar on the Path to Agility® – Introducing a simple yet powerful way to profoundly better outcomes
See firsthand how Path to Agility makes sense of Agile transformations
Get specific answers to your chronic transformation challenges
See potential impediments that have been stealing your momentum
Uncover capabilities to accelerate your progress
Business leaders have seen enough to believe that agility is the path to better business results. An empirical model that builds in continual improvement and consistent measures? That’s a powerful promise and explains why Agile is attractive. So attractive, in fact, that it’s hard to find a company today that doesn’t claim it’s agile or going agile.
Our experience and research have shown that the vast majority of organizations who take on an Agile transformation will either experience “superficial agility” which usually results in failure and reverting back to old, ineffective behaviors, or “pocket agility,” where some things may improve, but falls short of the true organizational improvements needed to be more resilient. Companies are stuck in transformation with no way out.
This is why we created the Path to Agility — a proven framework designed to help guide organizations through their Agile transformation journey. It helps by providing a clear approach for identifying the capabilities necessary to move forward and the visibility needed to resolve obstacles along the way.
The Path to Agility is designed for change agents and leaders who need to improve transformation consistency, quality, and results. For example:
Scrum Masters who are serving teams adopting agility
Coaches and consultants supporting Agile transformations
Leaders and executives who are guiding their organizations through transformation
Companies who demand predictable and measurable business outcomes
Why Business Outcomes Matter
Using business outcomes as a “north star,” the Path to Agility helps both teams and organizations evaluate where they are on the journey to business agility and map out what they should focus on next. It equips organizations with a simple yet powerful roadmap to profoundly better business outcomes.
Is your organization well underway implementing DevOps? Or maybe you’re just getting started with a DevOps initiative? Did you know you can maximize your chances of achieving desired business outcomes by combining DevOps with an Agile transformation?
You Keep Using Those Words…
When you hear “Business Outcomes,” “DevOps,” and/or Agile transformation” – what comes to mind?
We’ll share our definitions. (If you disagree with our interpretations, contact us…we love a good exchange of ideas!)
Business Outcomes
It’s more than outputs.
These are the highest-level objectives of your organization. The big WHY. They are key inputs for your business and technology discussions around WHAT to work on. They are measurable outcomes – goal posts – that provide feedback on HOW your initiatives are doing.
DevOps
It’s more than continuous delivery.
DevOps is the practice of software development (Dev) engineers and of IT operations (Ops) working together during a product’s entire lifecycle, from design through development to production support, in order to shorten the total lead time (from concept to cash) and to provide predictable delivery of high-quality products.
Agile
It’s more than “Scrum.”
Agile is an iterative approach that focuses on collaboration, customer feedback, and small, rapid releases in order to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of value. While the Agile movement originated in software development, it has been applied to much more: from medical devices to spacecraft, as well as engineering, marketing, and education.
Agile Transformation
It’s more than “Training, Titles, Ceremonies, and Tools.”
It doesn’t come in a box (or inside a cloud). It ain’t a silver bullet.
An Agile transformation is a rethinking and reworking of how your organization engages technology, people, and processes to achieve specific business outcomes. It is the relentless pursuit of continuous improvement.
What’s the Pay Off?
Agile transformations and DevOps initiatives are complementary. Can you have one without the other? Sure. However, if you put the two together you have the opportunity to align the tech side of the house with the business side. This combination will enable your enterprise to gain faster feedback, reduce risks while also obtaining meaningful business outcomes.
We’ve identified nine common business outcomes, all of which are positively influenced by Agile+DevOps. (Reference: Harvard Business Review Analytic Services Survey, Sept 2018).
In our experience leadership tends to “Want them all, equally. And NOW” Sorry. If everything is important, you know the saying, nothing is. Prioritization of the organization’s highest-level objectives, to avoid whiplash and to create focus, should narrow the field down to no more than three.
Employees are more satisfied in their work, willing to go the extra mile, passionate about the purpose of their jobs, and committed to the organization.
Customer Satisfaction
Customers are satisfied with the experience, benefits, and outcomes when using your product or service.
Quality
The product or service meets the expectations of the market for usability, reliability, etc.
Speed
The time it takes to deliver an idea into the market.
Predictability
Teams maintain a predictable cadence of delivery enabling the business to make informed business decisions.
Innovation
New ideas, creative thoughts, or novel imaginations provide better solutions to meet new requirements, unarticulated needs, or known market needs.
Market Responsiveness
The ability of the organization to pivot quickly to respond to ever-changing market demands.
Productivity
Increase the business value realized while maintaining or reducing costs.
Continuous Improvement
The ability of the organization to relentlessly pursue optimizations in all aspects of business functions.
It will be challenging as there are many potential impediments that could derail the transformation without the right support.
From organizational silos to legacy technology. From the need to ensure security and compliance, to the lack of the right skills and even the right mindsets among employees.
The good news is that there’s a path through. For over a decade, Agile Velocity has been helping enterprises chart and benchmark their progress during change initiatives. We’ve observed patterns of change, learning, and growth that move through five different stages, each building on the learnings from the previous stage. The Align stage is the first stage of the journey while Adapt requires a significant amount of agile maturity.
Align
Align the initiative with measurable business outcomes and define a clear transformation roadmap.
Learn
Establish foundational practices and a culture of learning by empowering teams to take ownership of their work and process.
Predict
Maintain a predictable cadence of delivery, enabling organizations to make informed business decisions.
Accelerate
Optimize the full value stream and shorten the time-to-market.
Adapt
Embrace organization-wide adaptability in order to quickly respond to market demands.
For software powered organizations (we could make the argument that 99% of all businesses fit this description), DevOps can significantly improve their ability to progress through the latter stages of Predict, Accelerate and Adapt.
Science has proven that introducing change into any system will result in a period of chaos until a new status quo is achieved. When adopting DevOps practices or undergoing an Agile transformation, organizations will experience a temporary decrease in performance before integrating new practices enables a new, more performant, status quo.
Many leaders don’t acknowledge or plan for the “dip” that accompanies the learning stage – adding more change, producing more chaos, resulting in failed initiatives. Any organizational change must have leadership support along the entire journey or it will be short-lived or fail outright. With leadership support and by using the stages as a guide, time spent in “chaos” can be reduced.
Like the authors, we believe that “Leadership really does have a powerful impact on results. . . . A good leader affects a team’s ability to deliver … how the team manages its work and develops products. All of these have a measurable impact on an organization’s profitability, productivity, and market share. These also have an impact on customer satisfaction, efficiency, and the ability to achieve organizational goals.”
Some of the key transformation elements which require leadership involvement include:
Sense of Urgency
Identifying and communicating the compelling reason(s) why the organization should change
Ensuring alignment around the compelling purpose has been achieved at all levels
Roll Out Strategy
Defining an initial transformation roadmap, one that takes into account organization structure demands, top risks, and incremental rollouts
Aligning teams to value
Enabling Action
Facilitating change to support the overall transformation
Resolving organizational obstacles and impediments with urgency
Continuing to communicate the change vision (rinse and repeat)
Cultural Shifts
All transformations require shifts in culture and mindset. How big? The standard answer: “It depends!” Some situational variables are current organizational levels of
Many organizations attempt transformations with disappointing results. If you perceive a gap between where your organization is and where you want it to be, we can help. Our client roster is filled with Fortune 500 companies and growing businesses alike – all of whom have benefited from our expertise.
We’ll help you shorten your feedback loops – so you can build the right thing, the right way, for the right people, at just the right time.
For the last 18 months, I have had the honor of working on-site with a client that has become family to me. We have gone through twists and turns and have made so much progress but just as we really start to accelerate the emergency brake was pulled by COVID-19. This virus has caused so many mixed emotions, but a few that stand out are fear of the unknown, vulnerability, and anger.
How does a virus impact our professional and personal lives to this extent? Logistically, I went from traveling almost every day of the week to being sequestered in my home with my children and husband. Sure I would work from home when I wasn’t traveling, but that was a perk and it was my choice. Now I am forced to stay within the walls of my home and I do not like this arrangement one bit.
The emotional impact has been far worse. I have an immeasurable passion for people and want to make a difference in their lives. I absolutely love my clients and have worked hard to earn their trust and confidence. The fear of the unknown is shaking me to my core.
Two weeks ago, we were told we had to work remotely until early April. This news was a difficult adjustment for an organization with a strong face-to-face culture, but I knew we would adapt. Monday evening I went into reactive mode making sure all my loose ends were wrapped up on-site to ensure I was setting things up for success over the next few weeks. When I walked out that revolving door I thought to myself “will I ever have the honor of walking into this building again?” I left the parking lot with uncertainty around if/when I will return and asking myself, “will I see the clients that have become my work family again? Will some of them lose their jobs? Will I lose my job? What will happen to my company?”
As questions like these raced through my mind, I quickly realized the list had no end and I needed to stop thinking about all the “what-if’s” and not let fear get the best of me. I am a planner, I like to be in control of my life, and realizing the situation was out of my control is when my vulnerability set in. I have no idea what tomorrow holds and I have to accept that because it is a sad fact.
On Tuesday morning, I woke up and had an emotional breakdown. I told myself there’s nothing I can do to control the outcome of this situation so I need to focus on what I can do. I wiped my tears, thanked God that my family is healthy, and started to virtualize my job as much as I could. Maintaining client relationships is my main priority so I committed to contacting them daily to ask how they are doing, and not just talk about work. In times like these, it is so important to be human and show compassion more than you usually do. I cannot tell you how much my clients have appreciated my simple texts asking “how are you and your family?”
Wednesday was a shitty day to say the least. This was the day we were informed that our work at my client site would be on pause until further notice. I cannot describe the emotions that ran through my body as I watched the faces of my work family take this terrible news. I could see the panic and felt the uncertainty of the unknown escalate to a whole new level. While we are a strong team, we’ve built strong relationships with our clients, and we will rise above this virus–but for now we all await the dreaded…. what’s next.
Right now, I am angry that all of the work that I have put into our client’s agility journey has been derailed temporarily. This is not the way this engagement was supposed to end. We are supposed to celebrate working ourselves out of a job because that means we did our job and our client is self-sustaining. While this isn’t the case now, I’m still working actively to make sure this isn’t the case in the future. I am still very present and I am going above and beyond to make my work visible and continue to add value to my clients journey!
While we do not have an end in-sight and our world is still careening on the COVID-19 roller coaster, the virus and disease it causes cannot steal who we are as people. Let’s take care of one another and support each other to the best of our ability. I challenge you to think about how you are best supporting your clients during this challenging time. Because together, we will get off this ride. #nobodyworksalone
Planning and executing an Agile scaling strategy is difficult. During my time as an Agile Coach, I’ve guided enterprises through successful Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) implementation–but it wasn’t all daffodils and roses.
In this webinar recording, Mike Hall shares some of the hard lessons he’s learned in guiding organizations through planning and executing a SAFe implementation. Mike includes real-world examples of when and how teams and organizations struggled and how we worked together to reach successful outcomes.
Key Takeaways:
3 lessons learned in implementing SAFe and what you can do to avoid common mistakes
Tips for dealing with organizational chaos during a SAFe implementation
Answers to your own questions about SAFe and the challenges you’re facing
Many organizations are stuck measuring and making decisions based on outputs – like velocity. In fact, team velocity is one of the most commonly used, abused, and misused metrics in Agile software development as well as during digital transformations. Teams, their managers, and even their stakeholders often focus on “improving velocity” without considering the entire value delivery system. Then they are shocked when they don’t get the business outcomes they really want, for example predictability or speed.
In this article, we explore healthy ways for your organization to use metrics to gain meaningful insights into the results of your experiments in the course of your Agile transformation.
Measure for a Purpose
As Simon Sinek famously says: “It all starts with why.” You need to understand what you think you are going to measure and why you want to measure it. When it comes to metrics in Agile, the data itself is not the goal — instead, it’s a means of tracking your journey, testing hypotheses, and providing feedback as you head towards your next goal.
That goal, the Big Why, should be focused on business outcomes, not outputs. Here are nine business outcomes (that come from Agile Velocity’s Path to Agility® framework) to think about:
Employee Engagement: Employees are more satisfied in their work, willing to go the extra mile, passionate about the purpose of their jobs, and committed to the organization.
Continuous Improvement: The ability of the organization to relentlessly pursue optimizations in all aspects of business functions.
Innovation: New ideas, creative thoughts, or novel imaginations provide better solutions to meet new requirements, unarticulated needs, or known market needs.
Customer Satisfaction: Customers are satisfied with the experience, benefits, and outcomes when using your product or service.
Market Responsiveness: The ability of the organization to pivot quickly to respond to ever-changing market demands.
Predictability: Teams maintain a predictable cadence of delivery enabling the business to make informed business decisions.
Speed: The time it takes to deliver an idea to the market.
Quality: The product or service meets the expectations of the market for usability, and reliability.
Productivity: Increase the business value realized while maintaining or reducing costs.
We recommend that your organization pick one. Sorry, you can’t have them all at once! Limiting your organizational WIP (Work in Progress) helps create a clear sense of urgency.
Reasons To Measure
There are many reasons to measure as you track progress towards organizational business outcomes during your transformation. These include:
Knowing where to invest your money – and to do so based on more than just gut instinct
Knowing if you are building the right things for our market
Measuring your performance and alignment — where your inventory (the software that the development teams create) that addresses features, defects, risks, and debt is not easily visible
Knowing if your customers and employees are delighted (or not)
Why Don’t More Organizations Measure More Things?
In our practice, we routinely discover that many organizations don’t have much in place in terms of metrics. Why not? Some reasons include:
People are afraid of weaponized metrics – ones used not for purposes of continuous improvement, but instead for comparison and punishment.
They were collecting vanity metrics, ones that didn’t offer any predictive power, and eventually considered measurement programs “useless.”
Metrics are actionable, however, they are presented in a way that people don’t find useful (for example endless tables of numbers instead of clear graphic representations).
Folks believed the “right things” were just too expensive to measure, and they failed to poke around to find existing data that would suffice.
They mistakenly thought the “right things” were immeasurable — and didn’t consider finding proxies.
Meaningful Agile Metrics for Digital Transformations
Successful organizational transformations put in place metrics programs that focus on global outcomes and meaningful feedback loops. This is true at any point along the transformation journey.
Here are a few idea starters for each of the Path To Agility business outcomes listed above:
Business Outcome
Example Measures
Employee Engagement
eNPS
Bad turnover
Employee referrals
Offer acceptance
Feedback surveys
Team learning logs
Continuous Improvement
Value stream flow efficiency
Reduction in recurring impediments
Cumulative flow
Innovation
Market Share
Number of validated business-level hypotheses developed and tested
Number of failed experiments
Slack time
Customer Satisfaction
Number of times a week team members talk to an actual customer
Common Anti-patterns for Metrics During Agile Transformations
There are many anti-patterns to be mindful of when implementing metrics in Agile settings:
Hawthorn Effect: Individuals modify their behavior in response to their awareness of being observed. (“Oh, watching the burndowns are we… well, here’s one set for you. The real set is on the back of the rolling whiteboard.)
Goodhart’s Law: All metrics of evaluation are bound to be abused. It’s just human nature. Individuals try to anticipate the effect of a policy and then take actions that alter its outcome. (Things like Class of Service, or rules like FIFO can be gamed. “That’s an expedite ticket, and I’m judged on time to first response? I’ll send it right back to ya with a question. Bingo, I hit my SLA!”)
Friedman’s Thermostat: Correlation does not mean causation, but it sure can be a clue.
Comparing metrics across teams: Teams all have different contexts. (Velocity, sorry to mention it again, is relative and team dependent. Same with throughput – “comparison” leads to over the wall development. Same with operational stability – “comparison” can lead to painful change management processes.) Cross team comparisons remove safety and learning. As Deming reminds us: ”Whenever there is fear, you will get wrong figures.”
Focusing on lagging over leading Indicators: Taking a macro-economics view for example: the level of unemployment is a lagging indicator. By the time you see an upward trend, it’s a bit late to stop it. A good leading indicator for this domain would be Architectural Design Firms submitting bids — a sign of pending economic growth, with job creation as part of it. Leading indicators in software: automated test coverage, code complexity, and team health.
Choosing vanity metrics: Good for feeling awesome, but bad for taking action. Funny things happen when we rely on vanity metrics. When they go up, all of us will be the first to take credit. When they go down… well… it wasn’t me!
Ignoring companion measures: Keep in mind there’s no free lunch. Measure holistically, so you see the tradeoffs. If you’re working on improving cycle time or throughput, you better also keep an eye on quality as well as team morale.
Measuring Your Agile Transformation Journey: Values, Intentions, and Purpose
When you:
Are transparent about what and why you measure what you do…
Think about your team members and customers as humans (not resources or wallets)…
Support your teams by thinking long term about values, intentions, and purpose…
…Then your organization will be able to handle the adversity that comes with today’s VUCA world. You’ll build and maintain resilience as you change the status quo, all the while developing a culture rich with collaboration and innovation.
Good things will happen — if you just stop focusing on velocity.
What’s Your Organizational Agility Score?
In less than an hour, you’ll get valuable insights into your organization so you can improve team performance and achieve your business goals faster.
The eagerly anticipated 
Is your organization well underway implementing DevOps? Or maybe you’re just getting started with a DevOps initiative? Did you know you can maximize your chances of achieving desired business outcomes by combining DevOps with an Agile transformation?
