Embracing Agile (Darrell K. Rigby , Jeff Sutherland and Hirotaka Takeuchi)
Agile innovation methods revolutionized IT: they have greatly increased success rates in software
development, improved quality and speed to market, and boosted the motivation and productivity
of IT teams. Agile methodologies involve new values, principles, practices, and benefits, and form an
alternative to command-and-control-style management. It’s spreading across a broad range of
industries and functions and even into the C-suite. By taking people out of their functional silos and
putting them in self-managed and customer focused multidisciplinary teams, the agile approach is
not only accelerating profitable growth but also helping to create a new generation of skilled general
managers.
As Agile brings huge levels of improvement to IT, opportunities in other parts of the company is
substantial. However, executives don’t know much about Agile. They might use related terms (sprints,
time boxes), but haven’t got through training and don’t really understand the approach.
Consequently, they continue to manage in ways that run counter to agile principles and practices,
undermining the effectiveness of agile teams that report to them, they:
- Routinely overturn team decisions and add review layers and controls to ensure that mistakes
aren’t repeated;
- Spread themselves and their best people across too many projects;
- Schedule frequent meetings with members of agile teams, forcing them to skip working
sessions or send substitutes.
With the best of intentions, they erode the benefits that agile innovation can deliver.
Agile is all about innovation. The method is less useful in routine operations and processes, but these
days most companies operate in highly dynamic environments. Companies that create an
environment in which agile flourishes find that teams can churn out innovations faster in new
products and services (1) and innovation in functional processes (2). Six crucial practices that leaders
should adopt if they want to capitalize on agile’s potential:
1. Learn How Agile Really Works
Some executives associate agile with anarchy (everybody does what he wants to), whereas others
take it to mean “doing what I say, only faster”: both are wrong. It comes in several varieties, having
much in common but emphasize slightly different things: scrum (creative and adaptive teamwork in
solving complex problems), lean development (continual elimination of waste), and kanban (reducing
lead times and the amount of work in process).
Scrum is employed the most and has relatively easy fundamentals: to tackle an opportunity, the
organization forms and empowers a small team (3-9 people, most full-time, cross-functional). The
team manages itself and is accountable for every aspect of the work. The team’s ‘initiative owner’
(or product owner) is ultimately responsible for delivering value to customers and to the business. He
divides time between working with the team and coordinating with key stakeholders (customers,
senior executives, and business managers). He may use a technique such as design thinking or
crowdsourcing to build a comprehensive ‘portfolio backlog’ of promising opportunities and
continually rank-orders that list according to the latest estimates of value to customers and the firm.
Meanwhile, he doesn’t tell the team who should do what or how long tasks will take: the team creates
a simple road map and plans in detail only those activities that won’t change before execution.
,Members break the highest-ranked tasks into small modules, decide how much work the team will
take on and how to accomplish it, develop a clear definition of ‘done’ and then start building working
versions of it in short cycles, known as sprints. The process facilitator guides the process, protecting
the team from distractions. The process is transparent to everyone: team members hold brief daily
‘stand-up’ meetings to review progress and identify roadblocks. Disagreements are resolved through
experimentation and feedback. Small working prototypes (or all of the offering) are tested with
customers for short periods of time: if they’re excited, a prototype may be released immediately
(even if some executive isn’t a fan, or others think it needs more bells and whistles). The team then
brainstorms ways to improve future cycles and prepares to attack the next top priority.
Agile offers a number of major benefits:
- Increases team productivity and employee satisfaction;
- Minimizes the waste inherent in redundant meetings, repetitive planning, excessive
documentation, and so on;
- Improves customer engagement and satisfaction by improving visibility and continually adapting
to customers’ changing priorities - bringing the most valuable products and features to market
faster and more predictably, and reduces risk;
- Broadens organizational experience and builds mutual trust and respect by engaging team
members from multiple disciplines;
- Reduces time squandered in micromanaging functional projects, it allows senior managers to
devote themselves more fully to higher-value work.
2. Understand Where Agile Does or
Does Not Work
Agile is not a panacea (remedy for all
difficulties) and most effective to
implement under conditions
commonly found in software
innovation (left).
These conditions do not apply to
routine operations (accounting,
maintenance). Since agile requires
training, behavioural change, and often
new IT, executives must decide whether
the anticipated payoffs will justify the
effort and expense of a transition.
Agile innovation also depends on having
a team of eager participants, instead of
having to coerce resisters.
3. Start Small and Let the Word Spread
The most successful introductions of agile usually start small: they often begin in IT (software
developers familiar with the principles), then agile spreads to another function with the original
practitioners acting as coaches. As interest grows, implementation of the methodology becomes
,easier. This requires an agile coach that knows how to work with people without a software
background, to avoid all terminology and examples to come from software (and sound like gibberish
to the business). This can be stimulated by developing a knowledge base about agile with (short)
articles about it or e-mails. Success in agile then attracts attention.
Velocity is measured by the amount of work accomplished in each sprint.
4. Allow “Master” Teams to Customize Their Practices
Mastering agile innovation is similar to a process called shu-ha-ri: study and master proven disciplines
(shu), branch out those disciplines and begin to modify traditional forms (ha), and laws and principles
are absorbed and people are free to improvise as they choose (ri). Before beginning to modify or
customize agile, a person or team will benefit from practicing the widely used methodologies; over
time, experience practitioners should be permitted to customize agile practices. A key principle
guides this type of improvisation: “If a team wants to modify particular practices, it should
experiment and track the results to make sure that the changes are improving rather than reducing
customer satisfaction, work velocity, and team morale.” If modifications are tested and found to
improve results, use them.
5. Practice Agile at the Top
Some C-suite activities aren’t suited for agile, but many are, including strategy development and
resource allocation, cultivating breakthrough innovations, and improving organizational collaboration.
Senior executives coming together as an agile team and learn to apply the discipline to these activities
achieve far-reaching benefits:
- Their own productivity and morale improve;
- They experience common challenges and learn how to overcome them, and thereby learn to
speak the language of the teams they’re empowering;
- They recognize and stop behaviours that impede agile teams and learn to simplify and focus
work.
Results improve, increasing confidence and engagement throughout the organization.
A number of companies did this, reallocating selected leader’s time from functional silos to agile
leadership teams. These teams rank-order enterprise-wide portfolio backlogs, establish and
coordinate agile teams elsewhere in the organization to address the highest priorities, and
systematically eliminate barriers to their success.
An example company saw that their management team was stuck doing things the same old-
fashioned way (moving too slowly and relying on too many written reports that always seemed out-
of-date), while teams were using scrum. It was decided to run the executive group as an agile team:
reprioritizing management activities, eliminating recurring reports, and daily 20-minute stand-ups. It
shows the organization that “executives work in the same ways as engineers,” increasing employee
motivation and commitment to agile practices. Scrum “takes the mystery out of what executives do
every day.” Working on agile teams can also help prepare functional managers—who rarely break out
of their silos – for general management roles. It exposes them to people in other disciplines, teaches
collaborative practices, and underscores the importance of working closely with customers—all
essential for future leaders.
, 6. Destroy the Barriers to Agile Behaviours
More than 70% of agile practitioners report tension between their teams and the rest of the
organization. Little wonder: they’re following different road maps and moving at different speeds.
Barriers such as traditional ‘waterfall’ testing processes, integration into core IT systems, and so on,
might cause the total time to release to improve very little. Techniques for destroying such barriers:
- Get everyone on the same page;
Individual teams focusing on small parts need to see, and work from, the same list of enterprise
priorities (even if not all teams responsible are using agile processes). If a new mobile app is the top
priority for software development, it must also be the top priority for budgeting, vulnerability testing,
and software integration. Otherwise, agile innovations will struggle in implementation.
- Don’t change structures right away; change roles instead;
Solely creating more cross-functional teams will rarely necessitate major changes in organizational
structure: those highly empowered teams need some form of matrix management. But that requires
primarily that different disciplines learn how to work together rather than separately and
sequentially.
- Name only one boss for each decision;
It must be clear who is responsible for commissioning a team, selecting and replacing team members,
appointing the team leader, and approving the team’s decisions. Other senior leaders must avoid
second-guessing or overturning the owner’s decisions.
- Focus on teams, not individuals;
The team’s collective intelligence is most important. Process facilitators continually improve this by
clarifying roles, teaching conflict resolution techniques, and ensuring that team members contribute
equally. Shifting metrics from output and utilization rates (how busy people are) to business
outcomes and team happiness (how valuable and engaged people are) also helps, as do recognition
and reward systems that weight team results higher than individual efforts.
- Lead with questions, not orders.
Leaders should never tell people how to do things: “Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you
with their ingenuity.” This management style helps functional experts grow into general managers,
and it helps enterprise strategists and organizations evolve from silos battling for power and resources
into collaborative cross-functional teams.
Agile innovation revolutionized the software industry. Now it’s poised to transform nearly every other
function in every industry. At this point, the greatest impediment is not the need for better
methodologies, empirical evidence of significant benefits, or proof that agile can work outside IT: it’s
the behaviour of executives. Those who learn to lead agile’s extension into a broader range of
business activities will accelerate profitable growth.
