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This summer, some of the industry's leading agile experts got together for a special roundtable – Agile back to basics: foundations, interpretations, and paving the way forward. Aligned Agility’s Tina Behers, VP Enterprise Agility, was one of those experts.
After the roundtable, Tina delved deeper into some of the issues raised with Ronica Roth, Co-founder and Principal of The Welcome Elephant. Issac Sacolick, President of StarCIO and contributing editor of InfoWorld and CIO Magazine, moderated their conversation.
They talked about:
We've pulled out some key insights below - you can watch the entire conversation here.
Embracing a cultural shift
When asked what's changed in agile transformation, one of the first things that comes to mind for Tina and Ronica is that cultural change is a more widely recognised concept. "More organisations know going into transformation that it's not just about a bunch of process changes and that it's an actual cultural change," said Ronica.
And while teams don't know precisely how they should think, talk, and feel about their work, more of them feel that they will have to change these behaviours.
Tina goes further, saying that more leaders are recognising that change has to start with them – that they have to embrace those behaviours to encourage an agile mindset to be adopted by everyone else. Sadly, that doesn't mean we've left the naysaying behind. In Tina's experience, some people still dig in their heels, convinced that they're already 'doing' agile or that they tried it, and it didn't work.
That's because of the power unsuccessful transformations can have on preventing that cultural shift from happening. "It's getting some of the folks who've been through bad transformations in the past to shift their behaviours to adopt agile and be better and quicker at their delivery, whatever it is," Tina said.
Taking agile beyond the team level
Next, Tina and Ronica focused on balancing a team's desire to adopt agile with an organisation's expectations. One expectation is planning – and how the waterfall approach to planning butts up against teams trying out agile. But Ronica made the point that forecasting is excellent and essential. "agile is not permission to say no," she said, "[to say] I'm not going to tell you what I'm building or when I'm building it."
To avoid these contentions, she said agile teams should counsel leaders to expect something different from planning – not a commitment nine months in advance, but a set of outcomes and hypotheses about achieving those outcomes. And explaining that agile tools enable teams to learn quickly what results are possible.
Tina made a valuable point about the bigger picture, too – because even with these misconceptions ironed on, agile needs to grow beyond the team level. "Ultimately, you end up with a conversation with the leaders in the organisation of, 'This can only go so far as a team-only function or a technical function,'" explained Tina. "The value of agility is really at the enterprise level – when everybody is working to achieve value faster."
Transformation killer
"Whether your transformation starts from the team level or from the top down," said Tina, "the transparency and the visibility of what we're executing on – what our experiments are, what the fuzzy stuff in the middle is – has to be very clear across the enterprise to keep the buy-in and keep the momentum."
In essence – there's no room for ambiguity regarding your transformation. Tina put it plainly: "Ambiguity is the one thing that will kill any effort. Whether it's transformation or just getting the kids to the baseball game on Saturday doesn't matter. Ambiguity will kill your ability to do that successfully."
Of course, teams often hide behind ambiguity – they say they're working on "technical debt" or planning a proof of concept around something vague. But there's usually a reason why they're doing that. Maybe because experimental behaviour has been discouraged or punished in the past, they're more likely to hide what they're working on.
Ronica insists it's vital for organisations to make people feel psychologically safe to try, fail, and learn. She asked: "How do we create a very clear ecosystem in which transparency leads to better decisions, better value stories, so you know you're working on things that matter?" Her answer? Practising and reinforcing that message over and over for everyone to be as transparent as possible.
Fighting for a better future
The last topic was the work required to bring technical teams on the agile journey. People can hang on to old ways of working and old ideas for fear of change, fear of obsolescence, or fear of poking their heads above the parapet. "In the past, quoting to the spec was safe," said Ronica. "You never got in trouble for doing that, even when it caused trouble. So how do I create a space where that team can bring solutions … where it's safe to have ideas, even bad ones, and try things and fail fast?"
Tina talked about how she often finds teams frustrated by these lengthy specification documents that fail to tell them why they're building something or that they know will cause problems down the line. She explains to those teams that in an agile organisation, they won't have someone who's not as familiar with their code as they are telling them how to change it.
"They're telling you what they need and why they need it and allowing you the autonomy and respect you deserve to build it in a way that meets that objective," she tells them. "Having that conversation with technicians, in my experience, has successfully gotten teams onboard with trying new ways of working."
Hear even more from Tina and Ronica in the whole fireside chat here:
This summer, some of the industry's leading agile experts got together for a special roundtable – Agile back to basics: foundations, interpretations, and paving the way forward. Aligned Agility’s Tina Behers, VP Enterprise Agility, was one of those experts.
After the roundtable, Tina delved deeper into some of the issues raised with Ronica Roth, Co-founder and Principal of The Welcome Elephant. Issac Sacolick, President of StarCIO and contributing editor of InfoWorld and CIO Magazine, moderated their conversation.
They talked about:
We've pulled out some key insights below - you can watch the entire conversation here.
Embracing a cultural shift
When asked what's changed in agile transformation, one of the first things that comes to mind for Tina and Ronica is that cultural change is a more widely recognised concept. "More organisations know going into transformation that it's not just about a bunch of process changes and that it's an actual cultural change," said Ronica.
And while teams don't know precisely how they should think, talk, and feel about their work, more of them feel that they will have to change these behaviours.
Tina goes further, saying that more leaders are recognising that change has to start with them – that they have to embrace those behaviours to encourage an agile mindset to be adopted by everyone else. Sadly, that doesn't mean we've left the naysaying behind. In Tina's experience, some people still dig in their heels, convinced that they're already 'doing' agile or that they tried it, and it didn't work.
That's because of the power unsuccessful transformations can have on preventing that cultural shift from happening. "It's getting some of the folks who've been through bad transformations in the past to shift their behaviours to adopt agile and be better and quicker at their delivery, whatever it is," Tina said.
Taking agile beyond the team level
Next, Tina and Ronica focused on balancing a team's desire to adopt agile with an organisation's expectations. One expectation is planning – and how the waterfall approach to planning butts up against teams trying out agile. But Ronica made the point that forecasting is excellent and essential. "agile is not permission to say no," she said, "[to say] I'm not going to tell you what I'm building or when I'm building it."
To avoid these contentions, she said agile teams should counsel leaders to expect something different from planning – not a commitment nine months in advance, but a set of outcomes and hypotheses about achieving those outcomes. And explaining that agile tools enable teams to learn quickly what results are possible.
Tina made a valuable point about the bigger picture, too – because even with these misconceptions ironed on, agile needs to grow beyond the team level. "Ultimately, you end up with a conversation with the leaders in the organisation of, 'This can only go so far as a team-only function or a technical function,'" explained Tina. "The value of agility is really at the enterprise level – when everybody is working to achieve value faster."
Transformation killer
"Whether your transformation starts from the team level or from the top down," said Tina, "the transparency and the visibility of what we're executing on – what our experiments are, what the fuzzy stuff in the middle is – has to be very clear across the enterprise to keep the buy-in and keep the momentum."
In essence – there's no room for ambiguity regarding your transformation. Tina put it plainly: "Ambiguity is the one thing that will kill any effort. Whether it's transformation or just getting the kids to the baseball game on Saturday doesn't matter. Ambiguity will kill your ability to do that successfully."
Of course, teams often hide behind ambiguity – they say they're working on "technical debt" or planning a proof of concept around something vague. But there's usually a reason why they're doing that. Maybe because experimental behaviour has been discouraged or punished in the past, they're more likely to hide what they're working on.
Ronica insists it's vital for organisations to make people feel psychologically safe to try, fail, and learn. She asked: "How do we create a very clear ecosystem in which transparency leads to better decisions, better value stories, so you know you're working on things that matter?" Her answer? Practising and reinforcing that message over and over for everyone to be as transparent as possible.
Fighting for a better future
The last topic was the work required to bring technical teams on the agile journey. People can hang on to old ways of working and old ideas for fear of change, fear of obsolescence, or fear of poking their heads above the parapet. "In the past, quoting to the spec was safe," said Ronica. "You never got in trouble for doing that, even when it caused trouble. So how do I create a space where that team can bring solutions … where it's safe to have ideas, even bad ones, and try things and fail fast?"
Tina talked about how she often finds teams frustrated by these lengthy specification documents that fail to tell them why they're building something or that they know will cause problems down the line. She explains to those teams that in an agile organisation, they won't have someone who's not as familiar with their code as they are telling them how to change it.
"They're telling you what they need and why they need it and allowing you the autonomy and respect you deserve to build it in a way that meets that objective," she tells them. "Having that conversation with technicians, in my experience, has successfully gotten teams onboard with trying new ways of working."
Hear even more from Tina and Ronica in the whole fireside chat here:
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