Agile Readiness

Four Spheres of Lean and Agile Transformation

Thomas P. Wise, Reuben Daniel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317183600
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Agile Readiness is designed to provide guidance to the manager or business leader in establishing a successful environment to enable fast moving agile and lean project methods focused on business systems transformation. Agile and lean offer huge potential as methods for reducing risk and costs, delivering early benefits and ensuring IT projects genuinely deliver the business transformation benefits that they promise at the outset. The conundrum for many organizations is that without a change of organizational culture, agile and lean methods are very unlikely to be adopted successfully in traditional organizations. Thus, the struggle that many (if not most) managers and executives face is not in how agile or lean development works, but in how to make agile and lean methods successful when working beyond software development. Thomas P. Wise and Reuben Daniel provide a clear view of the struggles and remedies. Their text uses simple ground floor experiences to illustrate the practices and behaviors necessary to create highly successful and effective agile and lean business systems transformation teams. In this book the reader will discover organizational strategies that build strong teams, an environment of trust, and project selection and planning strategies to create an environment of enablement in which agile and lean teams thrive.

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Chapter 1

Who’s Eating Your Lunch?

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The little guys are eating our lunch, and there doesn’t seem to be a thing we can do about it.

They’re quick, agile, and run lean. Lunch eaters like them sprint their way around us, the 300-pound gorilla in the market, while we pretend it isn’t happening, not willing to address this nimble little irritant. We try not to notice that the nimble little lunch eaters have grown, packing on pachyderm-size pounds, becoming the great white elephant in the room that we try to ignore while they feast, and we waste away, longing for our lunch. New products seem to flow from their creative engine and stream into the market place, and for them it works. They poach our customers, picking off the early adopters, the tech hungry, and the dissatisfied. It’s not as though we don’t know what they want, the customer that is, but it takes us so long to bring our new ideas to the market that they aren’t so new anymore by the time we roll them out.

These lunch eaters are often described as nimble, quick, agile. They adapt, driving new product offerings and new technologies, reshaping their processes ahead of market demands and staying just out of our reach. They run lean, not overly burdened by the same bureaucratic demands under which our large corporations toil. Lunch eaters tend to know why they exist. They see clearly the opportunities of the world around them, resolve their problems with a fine-tuned focus, and sprint toward each new product release.

How do they do it? There are stacks of books on how agile works. It’s not complicated. It’s not rocket science. For that matter, the processes in agile are pretty simple, straightforward, and align well with the normal practices of software development and engineering. They work well with architectural development, and business process improvement. We believe in agile and lean, because the methods work, and it works for them because they know how to be agile and have practiced how to be lean.

We’ve seen estimates, with a lot of glad-handing around the numbers too, that agile projects have about a 60 percent success rate (Wilson, 2011). Really? While agile practitioners point to other, more traditional methods as having less than a 50:50 shot at success, these numbers also reflect about a 40 percent failure rate for agile projects. So we wonder how successful are the 60 percentile, and what degree of success many of those firms are having with agile and lean methods. More so we wonder how an entire industry can celebrate a 40 percent failure rate.

Those that succeed must be doing something different from those that fail. Finding true failures sometimes helps in identifying ways to design success. Some of the key factors in agility-based project failures, according to Chow and Cao’s 2008 study, are tied to inadequacies in leadership, trust, team work, and skill sets, as well as cultural alignment.

Successful organizations are different. Firms that successfully make the change to agile and lean methods understand that the methods of agile and lean, while well documented and widely published, require preparation before implementation. What makes agile and lean practitioners successful has less to do with their methods, and more to do with how well their leaders prepare the culture of the organization to support the methods.

Managers, as they try to make the shift to agile methods, are often left to rely upon skills developed in a command and control environment. Agility requires autonomy and the freedom to build on incremental success, and incremental success may require building upon a temporary failure. While it is common to believe that executive buy in and commitment are essential to the success of agile practices, Chow and Cao discovered the most essential factors of successful organizations have transformative leadership, well-shaped skills, and a culture of open, team-based processes and communication (2008).

We remember as we attempted to make the shift in a financial company. We had recently merged two exchanges, and were in the process of bringing our waterfall and iterative development processes in line with the agile practices of our new owner. The company gave us a coach, and a scrum framework – basic essentials of an agile process. Teams met every morning for daily sprints, planned their day, shared their goals, set their schedules, and set forth to put their plans into action. Yet the support stopped there.

Management still held to the command and control practices of a traditional development organization, and developers, testers, architects, and analysts dropped like flies. People did their level best to provide a solid, quality product; however, the ability to shift plans, change priorities, and build a network of teams was hindered. Leadership was unable to shift from person to person to ensure technology problems were identified and fixed. Demand to produce on schedule was strong, people were highly motivated to succeed in this new environment, yet fear controlled the decisions of individuals who continued to feel powerless to raise concerns. Problems remained buried as developers scrambled to meet deadlines established in the vacuum of poor communication and low levels of trust. Team members worked 18 to 20 hours per day to make up for conflicts in code design and design changes which they stumbled across during integration testing, and architects spent many sleepless nights in analysis working to adjust specifications and system designs based upon these new revelations. In the end, many strong developers left the company ahead of a mighty crash and burn during production implementation.

Lean processes and agile methods are team-based practices. Making this change requires an organization to adopt and support new organizational behaviors that support teams and new behavioral-based practices that reinforce team methods. Distributed leadership skills, communication programs designed to build trust, and problem-solving programs that help managers and team members to choose the most effective methods are essential elements in every agile and lean initiative. Leaders need the ability and tools to choose the right method for a project, whether the project is an engineering design, problem-solving initiative, process change, or product development effort.

Facing the New Leadership Challenge

Agile teams, and teams charged with defining and refining lean process improvement, face new challenges in leadership that other groups may not face. Leadership within these groups may be described as transformative and at times transient. It shifts from one person to another, or from one group to another, and potentially moves across geographic and time zones as the need for leadership with specific skills and charters shifts with project priorities. As leadership moves from person to person to accommodate the shifting priorities of the project, many of those team members taking on a leadership role take this role in addition to their day job. In a recent study, 88 percent of respondents reported taking on the leadership role of project manager while only 13 percent of the respondents reported having only one role in the project (Wise, 2013). Problems in mentoring, coaching, feedback, and skills development may become greater challenges in this setting that may hinder processes such as team dynamics, communication, trust, and problem-solving. At times, leadership may by necessity be transformative; designed to build new skills and behaviors necessary to accomplish a given task or priority. Add to the mix the need to be virtual, and leadership skills can hit the red line. Virtuality carries with it the attributes of technologically mediated communications such as IM, chat, email, text, and web-based communications using camera technologies and desktop sharing. With the addition of the virtual technologies, managers require extensive new leadership and technology skills, and the ability to draw from a vast set of communication capabilities not required in the past, as well as deep process capabilities (Wise, 2011).

We have heard executives make statements that lead us to believe they may see agile and lean as being somehow synonymous. At the same time, many may believe they are mutually exclusive practices. The reality of the situation is that they are tools, and as with any tool they must be applied to the appropriate problem. Lacking the skills in process management can be immediately apparent to a technology team, and can add to the problems leaders face (Glen, 2003).

Avoiding these problems, and building an environment ready for agility and lean is why we chose to write this book. When we talk about agile, we are talking about a culture (Kruchten, 2007), a set of methods that use as their basis for getting work done the principles and behaviors of a collective mind, a virtual team membership. Teams and virtual teams share many of the same attributes including unique roles and responsibilities, autonomy, reciprocal collaborative communications, and shared meaning. Virtual teams, however, have some attributes that are often not found in the traditional team format such as swift trust, short work-horizons, and the need for transformative and distributed leadership skills.

Agility is often described by researchers and pundits as a culture all its own, or perhaps at times a subculture within a corporate environment due to the way in which culture affects how team members perceive the behaviors and contributions of other participants. Removed from this context, agile methods become nothing more than a caricature of the culture of flexibility and creativity, and a rather poor one at that, incapable of fulfilling the purpose and former beauty it once held (Kruchten, 2007). Success, then, is dependent upon creating and maintaining a culture in which agility may flourish and grow, feeding the needs and capability of fully functioning, high-performance teams assigned to appropriate defined projects.

Lean on the other side of the equation is a philosophy of process definition, refinement, and control. Often, businesses will copy what appear to be successful solutions from other businesses and expect great success. Why not? If the solution worked for a web-great such as Google or Facebook, why would it not work just as successfully for a web-great wannabe? At times, Näslund’s work tells us, this forklift mentality that assumes transformation can be accomplished with some degree of success by lifting the practices of one group and dropping them in like Microsoft add-on into an unrelated group (2008). The problem, once again, is taking a strategy or process out of the context of an agile or lean ready organization. Lean is a process for organizational improvement when the problems are not well known, and the solutions may be even less clear. In using lean we shift the internal focus of process quality to an external definition based on the desires and delight of our customer.

Each of these practices or methodologies can offer an organization great success if or when the leadership of the organization is willing and ready to lay a foundation that can facilitate the success. Taking the time to prepare the organization will provide the teams with the ability to succeed, and give the leaders the capability of transforming the processes from a linear model to one of flexibility and speed.

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Chapter 2

Myths and Common Pitfalls

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As international consultants there is a need to stay on top of trends and keep ahead of the curves, you may say. Normally this is not a hard a task, as businesses tend to run in packs. Where the big guys go one can be sure to find a large pack of followers that will pick up the new shiny thing, no matter the cost or casualties that may occur. Agile and lean, however, seem to be bucking that trend. The big guys picked up lean back in the 1990s, and agile became the new key word and popular phrase 10 years ago with the release of the agile manifesto. So what has driven the world to agile? The new rise of agile and lean methods in the work place is likely due to the maturing of a new crop of software and engineering students into the work place that have cut their teeth on these two methods in their university studies.

Universities all across the globe now offer classes and training in the use of agile methods in software and engineering practices. As the students graduate and entered the work place eager to express themselves and share their knowledge, they launch into new products using agile as their life cycle. This unbridled enthusiasm for the creativity and discovery they offer to their mentors allow them to drive ahead, producing new lean software packages rapidly onto the shelves for consumer use, and into the back offices of many of our top companies. These new graduates have now moved into positions of authority ramping up the usage and adoption of agile and lean methods and have contributed to the rise in the last decade. In this chapter we will discuss several of the more common problems in implementation of lean and agile, and perhaps a few potential contributors to the cause.

With the onset of the Internet age finding trends in the popularity of topics is now at our fingertips. Search engine providers such as Google offer some very nice research tools that tap into the interests of billions of people in an instant. As users search through the vast population of computers and servers across the world find information regarding their favorite topic and perhaps their new found interest, search engines store that information. Remember, nothing that crosses into the virtual world of computers ever really disappears. Google Trends, one of the top search engine analysis tools available, provides quick insight into the interest of Internet surfers and maps the changes in their interest over time. Using this tool, we can see how interest in two or more terms compare in search results on Google over time. Pictured below in Figure 2.1 is a “search” on Google Trends on four terms: Agile, Six Sigma, Lean, and Business Process Management (BPM). Business Process Management is a management practice based on the theory that is managers focus on managing the process as a whole, that the tasks necessary to maintain process flow will function effectively. As you can see, BPM is holding its own over the past 10 years which gives credence to the interest managers have in life cycle or process effectiveness.

Six Sigma, on the other hand, has been slowly declining as a search topic, and hasn’t been getting nearly as much attention as it had in 2004. Many people attribute the decline in Six Sigma popularity to the need for extensive training and the high cost of Six Sigma practitioners in the consulting world. Six Sigma Black Belts often draw six-figure incomes and quite frankly can be hard to find in the market place. Lean, a Six Sigma derivative that is light on the statistics side and easily trained and lightly mentored in practice, is holding a steady place in the search patterns of business people. Searches for agile, which many describe as being a lean method for software developers, is on the rise. Keep in mind that we are dealing with very large numbers when using search engine analysis tools.

Figure 2.1 Trend analysis of word searches from 2005 to 2014

Based on the number of topic searches regarding lean and agile methods it seems apparent that organization leaders realize the value of these approaches, but may not entirely position their organization to reap the benefits. One of the leading trends in agile use is the practice of continuing to scale agile methods beyond single teams and single projects. What this means in practice is the tendency to take very complex and highly interdependent projects, often the realm of the traditional waterfall life cycle, and manage these projects using agile methods. In the year 2013 an industry survey revealed a 15 percent jump in the number of respondents who work where there are at least five agile teams, and a 9 percent increase in those working with up to five agile projects. In addition, those who plan to implement agile development in future projects have increased from 59 percent last year to 83 percent in 2013. Most, 72 percent, are using Scrum or Scrum variants as in past years.

Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software development framework based on team membership and the incremental discovery of project information such as requirements and software architecture for managing software projects and product or application development. Kanban and Kanban variants nearly doubled this year. Kanban is a method for managing knowledge work with an emphasis on just-in-time delivery. In Kanban, as in scrum, the process is team oriented and the pace team driven in order to prevent overloading the team members with too much information. In this approach, the process, from definition of a task to its delivery to the customer, is displayed for participants to see allowing team members to pull work based on their interests and skills from a queue. For most respondents, Kanban methodologies were being applied to processes inside the software organization only (VersionOne, 2013).

Lean Shifts Quality from Fulfillment to VOC

When talking about a lean approach the consideration changes from team based decision and pacing based on the customer’s defined priority to management of costs in relation to how the customer defines quality. This moves the traditional definition of quality from fulfillment of and compliance with defined requirements to the customer’s priorities and definition of what is good known in some circles as the Voice of the Customer (VOC). Any manufacturing or developmental expenditure of resources that does not create value for the end customer is considered wasteful, and thus targeted for elimination.

There are several different forms of lean implementation in the industry today. There are organizations that work on a bottom-up implementation, where resources are trained, certified and then mentored to help them refine and employ their lean skills as they work on lean opportunities. This approach helps an employee perfect their lean skills and build more effective and refined processes as they improve their understanding of lean methods. Some organizational leaders like to take a more controlled and targeted implementation strategy that uses lean on a need by need basis for improving specific organizational goals, otherwise referred to as a top-down approach. Using a top-down approach helps to ensure that any changes made using lean are targeted toward the organization’s strategic or tactical plans. There are also organizations that implement just the lean tools like Voice of the Customers, Value Stream Mapping, Seven QC Tools, etc. Due to having several variations in the way in which lean may be deployed in an organization, and the likelihood that an organization may simply choose to use a limited set of tools without having defined a specific lean strategy, unlike agile, lean usage statistics are often hard to collect.

It can be confidently said that most companies use one or more lean tools for waste reduction in their firms. With lean being a simplified Six Sigma strategy with the intent on focusing a company and their employees on the desires of their customers, several analysts predict that the future of lean adoption is very likely to rise. Lean principles are a perfect match for every enterprise’s dilemma: creating more products, for more niches, at a faster rate and lower cost. The lean movement reaches deep into the enterprise. There are two drivers of lean principles apart from the obvious one – competitiveness. Lean has given enterprises, which have already shaved back on costs, a new language for motivating people to get creative on limited resources. Lean is appealing, then, to people in enterprise settings, particularly those who already take responsibility for agile processes. According to Shaughnessy, Brant and Patrick noted that even the owner of agile realizes their organization is not changing fast enough. That’s where lean comes in (Shaughnessy, January 1, 2013).

Success Rates of Agile and Lean

Since agile and lean adoptions are on the rise, let us evaluate some of their success rates. Agile, based on a 2010 survey, is perceived to be in trouble in 45 perce...