Do organisations really want or need to become Agile? (diary of a digital transformation)

I’m sharing my story for four reasons:

i) to help me reflect and learn

ii) to share my lessons to help you

iii) to connect and learn alongside people who want to develop

iv) to be honest and open about my experiences, good and bad (to set an example)

So this week, I wanted to talk about Agile and share my thoughts on where it fits in the organisational toolkit.

For those who are new to Agile, you can read the manifesto and its origins here.

If you spend any time on LinkedIn, you will find a lot of conversations about Agile which might be detailed conversations on its application through to debate on the principles.

In most organisations, Agile is either the de facto approach for software development or any type of business change or is being used either with official sanction or not in pockets in the organisation.

With all this interest, it seems that we can lose sight of the fact that it is a tool that offers significant benefits but it NOT an end in itself.

No shareholder is going to sit back when an organisation has ‘become Agile’ safe in the knowledge that their dividends will increase or their share value will be rocketing upwards.

The customers of that organisation will not have the slightest interest in whether the organisation is Agile, inflexible or double-jointed.

In the excitement to adopt Agile, we can forget why we chose it in the first place. Or, even worse, we can choose to adopt Agile without consideration of why we would do that.

I suggest that Agile is adopted for some pretty fundamental reasons:

• the organisation is currently losing ground to the competition
• OR the organisation is not serving its customers very well and is susceptible to a new or existing organisation (e.g. Amazon) who knows how to delight their customers

In that context, we are in a good position to adopt Agile, measure our success in terms of these objectives and alter our course accordingly.

And to be quite clear, Agile will NOT deliver on these objectives on its own. It will provide a great framework for delivering value to customers in an uncertain and changing world. And this is much better than project-based approaches which assume everything is knowable and can be analysed and then built without any need for change on the journey.

There are a couple of phrases in the Agile Manifesto which I believe draw attention to some of the gaps we need to fill with other tools:

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer
through early and continuous delivery
of valuable services. (note: I have changed software for services)

How do we discover what is valuable? This is not trivial, we cannot just ‘ask the business’. It brings in a lot of new tools such as design thinking, user research and service design.

Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they need,
and trust them to get the job done.

This is an excellent principle but, again, itis not trivial. In today’s organisations there is layer upon layer of complexity, labrynthine governance and organisational capabilities are specialised to the nth degree. (I talked about this in Putting your house in order). Finding out how to bring the necessary motivated individuals into the team or even simplify the organisation to provide the team with the environment and support they need is challenging and requires new tools. For example, using system thinking with a customer lens allows us to expose the complexity which will lead to new, more effective and simpler organisational designs.

I plan to come back to this and talk more about some of these other skills and, perhaps, the mindset and behaviours which are even more important in the future.

In closing, I ask that we all keep vigilant and don’t lose sight of the fact that Agile is only a tool and is (one of) the means and not the end.