Agile: More than Process for Process Sake
Many Scrum Teams get frustrated with Agile. They complain about too many useless meetings. They get tired of the “hamster wheel” of iterative work: once you finish one Sprint, your reward is… another Sprint! They sometimes feel that continual change means a lack of strategic direction. And that often success is measured in output rather than in customer value.
I feel bad for these people, for these are all symptoms of a company that has lost the plot. They’re usually following a process for process sake - they dutifully perform Scrum, or SAFe, or some other process as “Agile in Name Only” hoping that they’ll achieve the promised benefits.
Luckily, it’s never too late to do an Agile Reboot!
My guidance as an Agile Coach to any organization in this situation would be to focus on three things:
1. Start with Why. Ensure that everyone is crystal clear about what the team and organization is trying to achieve. In addition, be transparent about how you’re measuring success. After all, only after you know what you’re trying to do can you figure out how best to achieve it. An unclear purpose leads to an aimless process.
2. Connect Process with Outcomes. The ultimate goal of any process is to generate better (or standardized) outcomes, which I define as producing something that’s more valuable than what went before. I think most people would agree with this statement. However, many Agile teams lose sight of this when immersed in the daily grind – especially when in a complicated process such as SAFe. Why is this?
I suspect the main cause is a lack of a direct line-of-sight between the team’s work and the value that the customer receives from it. Thus, in the same way that executives will focus on velocity (that is, execution) rather than outcomes (customer satisfaction), teams will focus on executing a process simply because it’s easy to measure thing they can see. Since you are what you measure, you end up in a feature farm - doing process for process sake.
The way out of this trap is to do everything in your power to connect people with your end users. My favorite technique comes from the UX community: Exposure Hours. Jared Spool discovered that “The teams with members who spent a minimum of two hours every six weeks” observing or talking to customers greatly improved their product.
Employees that know what their customers want will focus their efforts on producing it. That leads to our final point:
3. Empower Teams to Adjust the Process. Teams that know their goals, and what their customer want, can take this knowledge and refine HOW they work. Take your current processes as a good foundation - and then give your teams the freedom to examine and tweak them in order to unlock their expertise in service to our goals. A good Agile Coach can help teams examine what’s working and what’s not working, but the important thing is that you use every iteration to question what’s working and what isn’t based on current conditions.
In other words, in a world where everything is changing, what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. A good Agile process deliberately and transparently enables teams to honestly review how they are performing against their goals, and allows them to experiment with ways of getting even better at it.
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If you’re frustrated with Agile - let’s talk! You can make any Agile process work for you by clearly defining what you want to achieve, what your customers really want, and empowering teams to adjust how they work to achieve their goals. With those three things in place, teams take control of their process so that it’s something that helps them - not something to tolerate or resent.
I’d be happy to help you figure this out. Schedule a 15 minute call with me and let’s talk about what your Agile reboot could look like.