AGILE IN ACTION

On Wednesday night Andrew Scotland ran a workshop at the second Agile Practitioners Forum. The event was organised by Les Oliver and Simon Voice and sponsored by Radtac and Connections Recruitment . The venue was the Gun Room aboard the HMS Belfast . The topic for exploration was bringing about the change necessary to accommodate the adoption of agile methods. At the heart of introducing agility into any large organisation is a huge amount of cultural, behavioural and organisational change. Andrew hypothesised that sometimes the need for this type of change is the primary driver for the introduction of agile methods and can be more important than the traditional drivers of improved ROI and improved engineering practice. Andrew provided a brief introduction that charted the BBC 's journey so far, where the introduction of Scrum (less focused on team behaviours and roles) proved more successful than the introduction of Extreme Programming (at that time more focused on engineering practice). The result is a prioritisation of the agile values where collaboration comes top. During the workshop, we will split into 4 groups to brainstorm factors that support change and factors that resist change. We then used a technique called force-field analysis to indicate the relative strengths of the factors.

When a company wants to make lasting change, for whatever reason, it’s usually not enough to change just the physical organization. Shuffling hierarchy, bringing in new people for existing roles, and creating new roles with new responsibilities will not, in and of itself, produce the enduring improvements being sought.

Compromised agility or agile mediocrity can be achieved in a command-and-control environment. Full-on agility can't. And so you miss out on all the benefits that come along with it: A whole new level of improved quality and increased productivity, creativity, accountability, leadership, energized work, motivated people and fun. If you're an executive manager serious about being agile and you're in a command-and-control environment you should start changing things to achieve lasting success. Start with the culture and the organisation and then move onto the people. Agility will not happen when scientific management prevails. The values and principles are diametrically opposed. Disband the command-and-control institutions and get rid of the traditional management mindsets. You need to be thinking of agile as a leadership mindset and an omnipresent culture that is built on trust, honesty and courage, and allows teams self-organise empowers people at the coal-face to make their own decisions facilitates collaboration, open communication and information sharing tolerates mistakes and encourages constant learning drives a continuous flow of business value to the customer energises people and creates a buzz seeks to eliminate waste and bureaucracy Create a place where people want to work. That said, agility will not happen without the right people. Given long enough, I'm convinced a command-and-control will create theory-X people. You want theory-Y people who have the right mix of talent and integrity to get things done. Don't have people tell other people what to do. Ask people to make commitments to one another about their work and what they will deliver. And ask them to hold one another accountable to those commitments because delivering against commitments builds trust. Dissolve groups of people who are siloed according to their roles, e.g. QA, Architecture, Project Management, etc, and instead build cross-functional teams organised around single and coherent products or services. These teams should include all the necessary skills - programmers, testers, sysadmins, DBAs, etc - to make decisions, take immediate action and get things done. People in a team work together so colocate them. Give teams the space to succeed and trust them to get things done. Don't use managers. Find leaders who will facilitate teams, maintain focus on the big picture and common goals, and preserve the new culture. Without the vocal support and encouragement of executive management coupled with visible demonstration of adherence to common values and principles, an organisation will not commit to change.