The Great Divide: How Leadership can Transform

For the last two years, I've been on the front lines of the clash between Waterfall Program management, and FrAgile IT development.  And I will tell you the people and results are battle-scarred.  Throw in a hearty dose of blame on all sides, and no one comes out a winner in this war.

How does this happen?  It all starts when IT goes one way and programs run by other divisions don't.  We all know that Agile isn't meant to abruptly start and end with IT, and yet many a business leader tends to want to treat that Agile thing that IT does as an odd indulgence that we need to humor in order to get the work out of developers.  Wacky Aunt Helen's house smells like cats and rotten eggs, but she contributes to the kids' college funds, so so we just smile and nod when she talks about taking in more strays.

From the Program Management end here are some common disappointments:

• Unpredictability
• Missed dates
• Missed requirements
• Lack of trust
• IT is slow and the enemy

From the IT development team side, there are disappointments, just as weighty:

• Pressure to deliver unrealistically
• Poor backlog management by Waterfall product managers
• Sense of failure
• Heavy tech debt that only increases
• "The Business" doesn't understand 

As for results?  Either something weak and half-baked is set to market, or, "We've been waiting for 18 months for IT to finish this project."  No value delivered.  

Then rather than leaning in to a wider level of commitment, executives who are understandably concerned about the board and shareholders, care less and less about this touchy-feely Agile stuff, and more and more about the bottom line.  IT then becomes a paler image of true Agile, and the business divisions become even more adherent to traditional program management, their most inflexible leaders become the most praised for their "standards" and the split becomes a chasm.  

And with blame being thinly disguised via the word "accountability" and the arrows flying across functions and up and down the food chain, now the culture becomes toxic sludge.  

How do we extricate ourselves from this dynamic?  Through leaders who are willing to acknowledge that it's a problem they can solve.  By being courageous enough to commit every division to following a Scaled Agile system- and commit the time it takes to shift to a different paradigm as a company, these leaders can not only stabilize, make predictable, and increase delivery for the company, but they can also draw out talent and retain people who feels energized by their work and their colleagues. 

That's the importance of a thoughtful servant-leader: (s)he can lift and empower an entire organization.  I've seen it happen with some of the most fractured businesses.  That's true transformation.  

A la Carte Agile

Let’s say you’ve decided that since "agile" means to move fast and quickly adapt, like 72%  of American companies using some version of Agile, you’ll adopt it too…. 

Only it’s too much to commit to preparing stories (can’t we just call them product requirements?) in advance of a sprint because you never know how the market will change or what the vendor will deliver.  And you can’t really fill the three roles (Scrum Master, Product Owner, Delivery Team) because you have folks who wear a lot of hats, and you don’t have the resources to nail down dedicated teams.  And how is it “agile” to require that the product owner lock down what needs to be done before a sprint?  That doesn’t sound flexible.  The team should be able to change direction at any point in any cycle.  And you really can’t require your developers to spend all that time in these warm, fuzzy meetings that Agile calls, “ceremonies.” That’s a waste of time. And certainly your developers need to put careful thought into building the foundation of the software, so really, sprint cycles should allow for continued work from cycle to cycle without unreasonably requiring folks to deliver end-to-end in two to four week sprints.  Other than that, you are 100% behind whatever those crazy team leads what to do.  By all means, go, agile!  Fast and nimble! 

Hard reality: when you take out any of these factors, you’re not really doing Agile development.  You’re doing some sort of hybrid of Agile and Waterfall, and that can be okay; you certainly may end up making  improvements by implementing some, but not all of the system.  I’ve done it, and it’s the preferred alternative to mayhem. But you’re not making a full paradigm shift to true transformation, and you’ll continue to experience foundational roadblocks. 

People confuse the formal title of the methodology “Agile” with the lower case “a” adjective, “agile.”  While the methodology does allow organizations to be agile, as in nimble, it’s not without structure, and specific process.

Save yourself and your organization unneeded, drawn-out heartache by ripping off the bandage as quickly as possible, adhering to the fundamentals and diving into the benefits right away.

This isn’t the agililty I signed up for….

We’ve trained up on Agile, now let’s get back to work.  There’s not a minute to lose! 

This can’t be right, say Executives and Product Managers.  We’re supposed to be able to tack from minute to minute because the market calls for reactivity and hairpin turns.   

This can’t be right, say the developers. We’re supposed to be able to develop in a dark corner until we deliver the full product you asked us to built.  We should be left alone for the next two years, if need be.

At first it may seem a disappointing compromise to both the "business" and development, but Agile finds the healthy intersection of the two extremes.  Development DOES take time and focus.  If an organization does not allow for that, only the smallest implementations, and very little truly innovative work can be developed.  The market DOES require adaptivity and quick shifts.  If that doesn’t happen, viable products aren’t delivered, revenue isn’t generated, companies fold. 

So, what would happen if we time-boxed development cycles so that every 2-4 weeks, we could depend on developers to built a Minimally Viable Product (MVP)?  Not the whole kit and caboodle with all the bells and whistles, but just the essentials.  Let’s say we were developing an app for finding the best business blogs?  We might first build a simple search interface using Google that tracked down most trafficked sites with the top three keywords.  That’s it.  Nothing more.  Developers would have 2 business weeks to focus only on that small manageable development task.  Then Product Owners and management would have a complete and deliverable product to get out to the consumers after 2 weeks.  Is two weeks fast enough to deliver a product to market?  Most would say yes.  Is 2 weeks of uninterrupted development time long enough to do some version of valuable work?  Most would say yes.  

Your team will likely be initially uncomfortable adapting to the Agile paradigm, but stick with it.  Everyone will be feeling the benefits soon enough.

The Dreaded P-Word

To executives, it’s meaningless, beneath their scope.  To developers and designers, it’s a waste of time.  To Product Managers, it’s an impediment to their work.  Why do we expend any energy at all on something as unnecessary as “process”? 

The classic worst case example is the well-known bureaucracy known as the government.  You want something done?  Here, fill out 20 forms, speak to these 30 people, jump through these 40 hoops, and wait these 50 years.  In this era of all-industry instability, break-neck technology changes with shorter and shorter cycles, and quick-hit investment and exit strategies, it seems that spending any time or thought on process is purely detrimental.  We all need to just get s*&^t done. 

Unfortunately, when we don’t take a moment to think through what we’re rushing to build and how we’re building it, that’s exactly what “gets done”: a big pile of crap.  And another company bites the dust.

The primary reason every organization should put time into the “how” of delivering their products?  Because the how actually directly contributes to the value of what’s being delivered and when.  And you don’t even need to put that much thought into it.  An entire methodology has been devised (and continues to be adapted along the way) to address the very circumstances with which today’s businesses are steeped.  It’s called Agile. 

For some of you, the word “methodology” triggered your eyes to start rolling back into your head. For some of you, seeing the word “agile”turned the thinking right back to “get s*&^t done.”  I’ll talk more about what this means to your business, and how Agile dramatically increases efficiency and value, but it’s not without some of the p-word (process), so apologies in advance. I'll try to go easy.