The golden laws of agile delivery

The lure of Agile as an approach to developing and delivering software is huge. Who can say no to the promise of faster releases with regular cadence, near-zero defects and teams being in ludicrous states of productivity and wellbeing!

Agile transformations are tough

Very few agile transformations are successful in terms of achieving goals and being sustainable after the transformation program ends. Transformations run out of steam as well as funding. You may have everything that screams agile -- like daily stand-ups, fortnightly sprints, Post-it cards on agile walls, Scrum Masters instead of Project Managers, and a swanky scaled agile framework -- except the delivery nirvana you were hoping for.

There are several reasons for this:

Transformations result in organisational benefits only when they are strategic and align with the end-to-end value-chain. Without a holistic strategy, you usually end up with pockets of agility without much organisation-wide impact.

Organisations have their specific nuances, be it culture, structure or ways of working. Agile frameworks may not provide pages and pages of detailed implementation steps and decision-making tips to deal with every surprise on your way. Organisations struggle to find experienced agile practitioners and agile coaches who can actually maintain sustainable agile maturity.

Frameworks are not often implemented in entirety. Have you been warned by enterprise agile coaches about the impact of those bits that were left out?

So you may not be alone if frameworks, roles, ceremonies and tools have not given you what you were promised. However, if you think you are not as agile as you expected or hoped for, it is time to step back and look at why agile usually works and why it may not be working for you yet.

Agile starts with behaviour

One lesson I’ve learnt over the years is that agile works because of certain behaviours across the board. These behaviours are often collectively referred to as the agile mindset. As a side note, unfortunately the very term “mindset” tends to get a bit divisive and alienating as it seems to marginalise a section of people as innately being not-so agile.

What exactly are agile behaviours? My simple definition is that agile behaviour recognises three things which are the three golden principles of agile delivery:

1. Business or customer value as the primary rationale for prioritising what to do.
2. Competency and focus as fundamental enablers of progress.
3. Feedback mechanisms to help improve value and quality assurance.

Let’s delve into these one by one.

Value-based Prioritisation

In its early days as a delivery approach, the key differentiator for Agile was the emphasis that the customer loves to see value being delivered. Delivering value continually and efficiently to the customer is so core to Agile.

When should you start tracking value in your delivery chain? A good place to start is using value to prioritise what gets funded. In fact, most organisations already do it. However, as programs get broken down into projects and further into releases and features, it often becomes increasingly difficult to track the value proposition. Maintaining the value-view of your backlog at all granularities is very important for agility. Without this view, prioritisation would revert to waterfall-size.

The concept of a single prioritised backlog is a good technique to ensure value. The role of the Product Owner is equally important as the chief orchestrator bridging between value and solution delivery. My observation, especially within financial services organisations that I’ve worked with, is that agile transformations have only started to recognise the significance of product ownership as a competence critical to value tracking and realisation.

To summarise, a good agile breakdown with the visibility of value to enable prioritisation at all levels is essential for agile delivery.

Skills and competence enables faster delivery of quality outcomes

Recently, I requested a conference audience for a show of hands if they ever assessed or audited the availability of needed skills before they embarked on a project. A single hand went up!

Is it a modern myth that professional knowledge work can be delivered without the necessary technical and leadership skills? The problem becomes worse when organisations have senior and mid-level managers who are unaware of the breadth and depth of skills required within their own teams. The lack of appreciation for mature competence sometimes even leads to craftsmanship being seen as indulgence.

Is it a modern myth that professional knowledge work can be delivered without the necessary technical and leadership skills?

Resourcing the right skills and competence has nothing to do with waterfall or agile. It is just due diligence or sound management. Technology work require technology skills. Or have we put the focus much on the transformation and behaviour that we put the cart before the horse?

Ready availability of skills saves time that the team otherwise require to learn through mistakes. Mature competence definitely results in better quality and also faster turnaround by saving time lost due to rework.

Focus facilitates progress

As humans, distraction or lack of focus is probably one of the biggest hindrances that prevent us from completing goals. This is a corollary from Miller’s law and other cognitive limits. As if those six senses weren’t enough, it is just constant tussles between strategic and operational work, new development versus production support, one critical project versus another, and many more.

A good example for focus is offsite meetings that gather people away from usual work settings and remove the normal interruptions. War rooms for dealing with critical incidents is another example.

Agile frameworks are effective because they provide sustainable mechanisms to ensure focus across the value delivery chain.

• At the business level, program scheduling and funding creates a contained scope to focus on.
• At the delivery level, cross-functional feature teams or squads (ideally) concentrate on everything needed to deliver value, ideally without working on multiple programs.
• Breakdown into releases and features provide medium and short term focus for feature teams.
• Sprint backlogs provide high-level focus within time-boxed iterations or sprints.
• Stories and tasks help breakdown windows of focus to a handful of days, so that people can collaborate and deliver small distinct pieces of value with less distraction.

In short, work breakdown (strategic goals -> programs -> projects -> releases -> features -> stories -> tasks) along with delivery timeboxes (daily standup, sprints, releases) is the Agile mechanism to provide required focus to deliver value. It is interesting that many organisations still meander through agile transformations with waterfall-sized delivery breakdown.

Feedback to improve assurance and quality

Fast and frequent feedback is the agile mantra. There are three key purposes where agile methodologies rely heavily on feedback mechanisms:

• Value assurance: Early business or customer reviews via prototyping, low-fidelity artefacts and regular showcases are all examples of such feedback to ensure that the solution being worked on delivers the intended value across all phases of design and delivery.
• Quality assurance: All forms of testing give feedback on intrinsic quality. Automated and continuous testing provides fast regular feedback.
• Maintain effective ways of working: Retrospectives at the team and organisational levels help learn from experiences to uplift productivity and efficacy. They also help the team adapt continually.

If quality is something that worries you, it is worthwhile to check if one or more of the above feedback mechanisms are missing or ineffective.

What if you are doing all of this - value, competence, focus and feedback - yet struggling with agility?

Looking beyond frameworks

The multidisciplinary nature of agile transformations

An agile transformation is multidisciplinary and multidimensional.

Agile methodologies combines insights and best practices from several disciplines that contribute to delivery. This includes soft-skill areas such as leadership, cognitive behaviour, collaboration and team dynamics along with technical areas such as software engineering, solution architecture and project management. An agile transformation is much more than an organisational change initiative.

An agile transformation is much more than an an organisational change initiative.

Frameworks may not cover everything

Apart from the three key principles of value, focus and feedback, here are a few things frameworks may not talk about:

• Processes and templates can help to achieve consistency on a repeatable basis, especially at scale when several teams need to work together.
• Engineering practices and tools allow simple, fast and efficient ways to enable focus, feedback and quality. In fact, most of the faster turnaround from agile can be traced down to availability of improved tools.
• Collaboration tools like Atlassian JIRA and Confluence have the power to help capture and manage knowledge on a daily basis while facilitating traceability and visibility for lean operations and executive reporting.

So where do I start?

Having competent transformation strategists and agile coaches who have in-depth experience in both behavioural and technical aspects of delivery can go a long way in ensuring a holistic transformation with outcomes that make everyone proud. However, without all the bells and whistles, you can still be agile if you ensure the following.

• Practise value-based prioritisation and work breakdown.
• Provision teams with every required skill and competence for the delivery at hand.
• Ensure focus for teams and individuals without competing priorities.
• Enable fast, frequent feedback all across the organisation to assure early and efficient delivery of value with quality.

On that note, it is time to skip the manifesto and do a fresh read of the principles behind the Agile Manifesto. Because that is where it all began!

Image credit: https://unsplash.com/photos/jKU2NneZAbI

Posted under: Agile Maturity