Category: Agile & DevOps

The engineering industry is constantly evolving. Staying ahead of the curve requires a deep understanding of emerging trends and technologies. In the recently launched The 2023 State of Engineering Management Report, Jellyfish uncovered several key findings in regards to where engineering teams are investing their time, what challenges teams are facing on an operational level, and notable differences between underperforming and overachieving teams. The report underscores the importance of efficiency, engineering leadership, business alignment, and data-driven decision-making. Here’s our take on the results.

Efficiency, a key theme of the report, characterizes a business’s ability to optimize processes and reduce waste. In a manner unseen before, businesses are working to streamline workflows and minimize the number of steps required to complete a task to achieve faster turnaround times, reduce costs, and improve overall productivity. Businesses must embrace efficiency to deliver products and services to market more quickly, to create a major competitive advantage in today’s fast-paced business environment.

Pillar 1: Prioritization and Delivery Management

The Trend

Engineering leadership is another key area of focus highlighted in the report. Effective leadership can drive innovation, inspire collaboration, and help teams to achieve their full potential. By providing clear direction, setting goals, and empowering teams, engineering leaders can create a culture of excellence that drives business outcomes.

The Problem

Engineering leaders commonly question the value they are driving from investments or aren’t satisfied with their delivery organization. Leaders must be proactive about aligning work around value and business outcomes. In some cases, this may require implementing a new operating model or reorganization of the teams to plan, prioritize and implement work.

45% of Engineering leadership cited that their biggest challenge is making sure everyone is focused on the highest priority work

Key Strategies to Employ

While visibility has improved in recent years, it continues to be a key challenge for engineering leaders. There is still much work to be done to ensure leadership is continually aware of certain types of work that are taking time away from established priorities. Here are 3 rules for every engineering leader to increase transparency and build trust and confidence in their teams:

1. Set clear priorities and goals: Make sure that your team knows what they are working towards and what success looks like.
2. Foster collaboration and traceability: Consider uniting, consolidating or integrating your tech stack for the traceability to identify problem areas.
3. Empower team with learning: Forget failing fast, learn fast instead, and encourage teams to do the same by continually leveraging performance metrics and providing learning and enablement opportunities where necessary. Teams can benchmark themselves against performance metrics, and the introduction of performance metrics, when done correctly, can be a helpful way to identify areas of opportunity and growth. Teams mustn’t fixate on one metric, instead employing a balanced approach to metrics, where metrics play checks and balances against each other (ex: speed vs quality).

Pillar 2: Business Alignment

The Trend

Business alignment is another critical component of engineering success. Aligning engineering goals with broader business objectives can help ensure that all efforts are focused on achieving key outcomes. This alignment can help businesses to optimize investments, allocate resources effectively, and ultimately drive better business results.

The Problem

We commonly see that business and engineering teams are out of sync and teams across the board are riddled with issues related to governance and/or gaps in maturity of practice. Misalignment among teams and departments often results in misunderstanding of work, conflicting goals, lack of productivity, and wasted time and effort. If you can achieve better alignment, you can tune business impact, increase operational efficiency, and drive the right outcomes faster.

Key Strategies to Employ

Software development is complex, but it’s important to build towards a holistic view of how engineering drives value. Build toward a solution that increases operational efficiency, team effectiveness, alignment, and transparency of work. Aligning the business around value helps teams collaborate more effectively and change to the needs of the business.

Pillar 3: Data-driven Decision Making

The Trend

Data-driven decision-making is essential to both engineering leadership and business alignment. It is truly the glue that binds them for business impact. By collecting and analyzing data, businesses can gain deep insights into customer behavior, market trends, and detailed business performance. These insights can be used to make informed decisions, optimize processes, and drive better business outcomes.

The Problem

It’s hard to fix what you can’t see, so that leaves organizations hyper-focused on trying to move faster, plan faster, develop faster, release faster and at scale. But, as you move faster, people, process, and technology break down. We see incomplete or missing estimates, missing context, and teams working on things not deemed a priority. This kind of breakdown points directly to data hygiene and governance issues.

Data-driven teams who leveraged Engineering Management Platforms (EMPs) saw significant improvements across the board, including a 15% increase in throughput, 17% decrease in cycle time, and a 9% increase in collaboration.

Key Strategies to Employ

For better or worse, every organization has a process and technology flow that brings them from an idea to customer value. This is called a value stream. When it is optimized through process refinement, integration, and waste reduction, value flows faster. A key component in doing so is applying data to the value stream. Cprime’s analytics and data management services allow businesses to collect, analyze, and use data to make informed decisions. By leveraging data to drive decision-making, businesses can identify areas for improvement and ultimately achieve better outcomes.

Engineering Leadership in 2023

Ultimately, the key findings from the report all point towards a singular goal: driving better business outcomes through effective engineering management practices. As businesses continue to navigate an ever-evolving landscape of technology modernization and digital transformation, the need for reliable solutions integrators has become increasingly important. A solutions integrator like Cprime can help streamline operations, optimize processes, and achieve more lofty business goals.

About Jellyfish

Jellyfish is the leading Engineering Management Platform that enables engineering teams to align their work with strategic business objectives. By analyzing engineering signals and contextual business data, Jellyfish provides complete visibility into engineering organizations, the work they do, and how they operate. Companies like Mastercard, Priceline, Zoominfo, and Pagerduty use Jellyfish to maximize the business impact of engineering.

For more information about us, visit jellyfish.co

At the time of this writing, which is early-2023, Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe) remains the most popular framework in use around the world for scaling Agile teams. Despite its popularity, SAFe is not perfect by any means—no framework is perfect for every situation.

One of the missing components of SAFe is a prescribed approach to handling unplanned work, which is likely a common occurrence for any organization attempting to adapt to an increasingly dynamic business environment. While SAFe does not provide specific guidance on how to manage unexpected surprises, there are a few elements within the framework that you can leverage to reduce the negative effects of such situations.

What is “Unplanned Work”?

Before we explore options to manage unplanned work using SAFe, it’s important to first clarify what “unplanned work” means.

For this discussion, let’s assume that “unplanned work” is equivalent to new requirements that have arisen during execution of a Program Increment (PI) that was identified by stakeholders and/or driven by unforeseen business conditions. In this context, “unplanned work” does not include “discovered” work—specific tasks that the team identifies throughout the PI that needs to be done to fulfill a previously planned Feature or Capability. While the techniques used to address either scenario may be similar, for simplicity, we’ll focus on the former definition.

What Does Success Look Like?

The ability to manage change effectively is key to any Agile initiative. Whether you are adopting SAFe or not, your team must be able to handle unexpected events gracefully  to deliver on your commitments. So, what does “success” mean in this context?

Successful management of unplanned events typically translates to effective delivery of value despite changes in the business environment, which could originate from customer or competitor behavior. Hence, if your team is effective in handling changes in their backlog, you will be able to maximize your chances of successfully meeting the PI Objectives and business goals.

Techniques for Dealing With Change

If your team is applying SAFe, there is limited guidance to assist you in managing changes in requirements. However, if you explore some of the guidance more closely, you will fine some hidden tips that can help you.

Keep an Eye on the Amount of Change With Requirements Volatility

One of the keys to managing changing requirements is to establish and maintain a metric that you may not have heard of: Requirements Volatility. This metric is similar to predictability, but is a leading indicator that enables your Agile Release Train (ART) to keep an eye on the amount of change that occurs within your requirements.

SAFe has several backlogs for maintaining and managing work at various levels, with the Portfolio Backlog at the top of the hierarchy. Most teams that are operating Portfolio-level SAFe will leverage this backlog to manage the high-level business requirements, usually stated in the form of business cases or initiatives. Since this backlog, as with all the other backlogs, is intended to be organic and continuously evolving, it is often difficult to understand the amount of change that is occurring, since there is no “baseline” or “freeze period” that takes place. This means that in order to deploy a metric like Requirements Volatility, you have to take a snapshot in time at regular intervals in order to assess the level of change.

Measuring Volatility

When might be the right intervals to take snapshots? As I mentioned previously, SAFe does not provide any guidance on this, but one approach that I have observed to be effective is to take a measurement at PI boundaries (at minimum) in order to evaluate how much change has occurred within the backlog. This will enable you to determine how many new requirements/epics have been introduced within that period of time.

If you are experiencing significant shifts in priorities within your PI, you may want to take the same measurement at the Program level (within the Program backlog). You could also do the same for the Team-level backlog as well if you observe massive changes in requirements, which is both undesirable and potentially destructive to your ART.

While there will likely be a cost associated with measuring and tracking volatility of requirements, you may observe trends that could alter how work is introduced and/or prioritized, which is an important factor that could dictate the effectiveness of the ART.

Applying Capacity Allocation to Handle Unexpected Change

Another technique that you may consider for managing requirements is Capacity Allocation of your backlogs. Within the backlog at each level of SAFe, you can determine how to organize and plan your work to ensure an optimal balance between Enablers, Features, and Technical Debt. This helps you deliver short-term value and foundational infrastructure to prepare for longer-term functionality that you will need in the future.

One method you could explore is to encourage your teams to only plan up to 80 percent of maximum capacity in order to provide a buffer for expected changes in requirements; if your stakeholders have a tendency to change priorities frequently or unexpectedly, having the extra capacity to address these situations can improve your teams’ ability to continue delivering valuable system capabilities.

One recommendation in this situation is to continue educating your customers and stakeholders about requirements management; help them understand that constant change is not ideal and potentially damaging. Even if your team can deal with this effectively, it is ‌not sustainable and not good for morale.

Closing Thoughts

While we all know that change is inevitable and should be embraced, there is no perfect system for dealing with unplanned work. A significant contributor to how we experience change is our relationships—our level of collaboration with the customers, stakeholders, and our teams is ultimately what will determine the outcomes of any project.

So, if you are in a situation where things aren’t going as expected, try to experiment with some techniques I shared and encourage the team to come up with new ideas as well.

And, if you need more advice or guidance from an Agile expert, download our white paper, Using Lean-Agile Principles to Execute Organizational Transformations, or explore our SAFe coaching and consulting solutions.

SAFe and Scaled Agile Framework are registered trademarks of Scaled Agile, Inc.

It is painful to watch how some enterprises treat the Scrum Master role like a commodity: Scrum Masters are all the same and easily exchangeable. A generic input and an expense to be reduced. They are often treated more as administrators and scribes than as critical enablers for delivering superior economic outcomes. As a result, the Scrum Master role is often viewed as a dead-end with no growth opportunity.

The Commodity Attitude and Agility

This commodity attitude is tragic for the individual laboring under this mindset and economically limiting for the enterprise. This mindset robs the enterprise of the Scrum Master’s and one of Agile’s fundamental value propositions: superior economic outcomes through our way of working.

The Agile Manifesto’s first declaration, “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”, calls out the dramatic influence our ways of working together have on outcomes.

From study after study—from Scottish coal miners in the 1950s to NUMMI, the joint Toyota-GM venture in the 1980s, and even on nuclear submarines—we have learned that a key determinant to successful outcomes is how people work together.

This is Why I Am in This Crazy Agile Coaching/Mentoring Business

Years ago, I believed that to deliver great products, you just assembled raw engineering talent and then got out of the way. My eyes would roll up whenever our leadership talked about methodology and practices.

I could not have been more wrong.

After quite a few hard lessons and some mentoring from the CEO of an amazing startup—Ken Spencer of Creo Products—I learned firsthand how people work together is an outsized driver of economic outcomes. Alistair Cockburn succinctly summed this up in his quip “People trump process.”

Agile as a Competitive Advantage

In most Agile frameworks, the Scrum Master role is primarily concerned with the team’s way of working. When we treat our Scrum Masters as commodities—interchangeable and as a cost to be reduced—we are demonstrating that we do not regard our way of working as a competitive advantage.

Unfortunately, commodity cultures struggle with sensing and responding to opportunities and threats in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world. Commodity cultures find it hard to exploit change for economic benefit.

So, if we believe our way of working is a competitive advantage, then how do we de-commodify the Scrum Master role and acknowledge the value this role brings?

Six Guidelines for De-Commodifying the Scrum Master

Here are six guidelines for de-commodifying the Scrum Master role and turning it into a contributor to Agile success:

1. Understanding What the Scrum Master’s Role IS NOT

First, let’s be perfectly clear, the Scrum Master is not an administrator putting meetings on people’s calendars. They are not a scribe taking notes from those meetings to present to a project manager. And most certainly, they are not a project manager assigning and dictating tasks to the team.

2. Understanding What the Scrum Master’s Role IS

Their job is helping the team be a team and not a group of people who happen to work together. Their job is to help them discover their greatness as a team. Yes, I know this sounds fuzzy, but after being in this industry for nearly 40 years, I have discovered one truth: the fuzzy stuff drives economic outcomes.

Orgs must acknowledge that the Scrum Master role is primarily a coaching role. In fact, I like to say their job is to put me (an Agile coach) out of a job. Coaching is an intimate relationship with a team and is very much influenced by personality types. An individual who is a rock star with one team could fall flat with another. A team should be able to interview their Scrum Master, even if it is a team member who is being considered for the role.

3. Position the Scrum Master Role as an Opportunity for Advancement

Third, the Scrum master role must be seen as an opportunity to advance one’s career by developing strong facilitation and coaching skills. These are essential skills for anyone seeking a leadership role in an enterprise regardless of whether they see themselves as a manager or a senior engineer. Leaders must learn it’s not about making themselves appear great but about making others great.

The Scrum Master role is an excellent gateway to developing those skills. Contract Scrum Masters bring valuable new skills into the enterprise and can help start an organization on their Agile journey by mentoring and coaching internal Scrum Masters. However, to truly grow an agile organization, the Scrum Master role should be performed by someone who desires to grow their career with the enterprise.

4. Acknowledge That the Scrum Master is Not Always a Full-Time Role

Fourth, the Scrum Master role should not be a full-time job description.

A newly formed team may need full-time coaching to help them speed up their journey through the Tuckman curve (forming, storming, norming, and performing). However, as the team begins to function as a team, the direct coaching demands of the Scrum Master will diminish.

Personally, I prefer an appropriate team member who has leadership aspirations to receive 50% release time from their regular responsibilities to fulfill this role. Other enterprises may have a Scrum Master facilitate multiple teams.

5. Delegate the Running of the Team to the Scrum Master and Their Team

Fifth, delegate ownership of the team’s way of working to the Scrum Masters and their team.

Far too many enterprises are obsessed with “maturity,” which is often code for rigid compliance to some centrally defined framework or methodology. This compliance mindset impedes relentless improvement. Agile is about sensing and responding to change, and the way of working must also sense and respond to change. Practices introduced by Agile frameworks are a good starting point but were never intended to be a methodological straight jacket. After all, why do we have retrospectives if not to improve our way of working?

A discipline of “improvement experiments” can serve as an important guardrail on the evolution of the teams’ way of working. Most importantly, when the team owns their way of working, they will need time and space to focus collectively on improving their way of working. It’s not going to happen “after hours”.

6. Set Up a Support System for the Scrum Master

Finally, don’t let the Scrum Masters stand alone. Set up a supporting ecosystem for the Scrum Masters to share, learn, and improve together.

Do this by establishing a Scrum Master community of practices (CoP). The CoP becomes the focal point for mutual support and collectively driving improvement. During practice meetings, Scrum Masters can seek advice and share their experiences. A simple mantra we have for the Scrum Master CoP is, “we’ve got your back!” Through the CoP, Scrum Masters can drive improvement by sharing the results of improvement stories and deciding on improvement stories to add to their respective backlogs.

How an enterprise treats its Scrum Masters is a barometer of the value it places on its way of working.

• Are the Scrum Masters seen as valuable drivers and contributors to relentlessly improving outcomes, or are they seen as just another commodity and all the same and interchangeable?
• Do they foster team growth or is their job to perform administrative and reporting tasks for the team?
• Is their role to actively drive process improvement or to enforce compliance with fossilized standard operating procedures and practices?

How we answer these questions is the difference between “doing Agile” and being agile.

This is the third in a three-part series of articles covering the POETIC Leadership approach to Lean-Agile leadership, authored by Alex Gray, a Lean Agile Practice Lead at Cprime. Click below to visit Parts One and Two:

• Part One: Personal and Organizational
• Part Two: Emotional and Team Thinking

In the first article of this series, we discussed why organizations that wish to employ Lean-Agile methods must promote a culture that supports that way of working. And, we began discussing what that culture looks like and how they can develop it—first on a personal level, then organizationally. In the second, we covered why emotional intelligence is vital for Lean-Agile leaders, and the value of instilling team thinking into the organization.

We recommend reviewing both articles first, if you haven’t already, to get some context for what we’ll be discussing in this article: the Intelligent and Curious components of the POETIC Leadership model.

I – Intelligent

Of course, an effective leader must act intelligently. That should go without saying, but it’s not always a primary concern when people are hired or promoted. To be successful in a Lean-Agile environment, POETIC Leaders must have a sufficient IQ to support continuous learning, a solid grasp of Lean-Agile values and principles, strong domain knowledge to support the teams’ efforts, and the ability to utilize this intelligence when making business decisions.

IQ

Intelligent leaders need to have a good general IQ. Importantly, they don’t need to have a high IQ to be effective. It certainly can be helpful in a lot of situations, but there are also many other factors that are equally or more important for leadership success.

The main reason an adequate IQ is beneficial for leaders is because it means they will be able to absorb and retain vital information, and apply what they’ve learned to new situations and necessary decisions as they arise.

Lean-Agile Values and Principles

Intelligent leaders develop a solid understanding of Lean-Agile principles because they recognize these principles will help their organizations become more efficient, responsive, and innovative.

Lean is a philosophy and set of principles that focuses on maximizing value and minimizing waste across the organization. Agile is a framework for managing product, development, and teams. It’s based upon the idea of iterative and incremental development where teams work in short cycles or time boxes to deliver small high quality increments of a product or service together.

Lean-Agile principles can help leaders in many ways. For example, they can:

• Improve efficiency and productivity by reducing waste and streamlining processes
• Increase customer satisfaction by providing higher-quality products and services
• Foster a culture of innovation and continuous improvement by encouraging experimentation and learning
• Enhance team collaboration and communication by promoting transparency and flexibility
• Increase agility and adaptability, allowing organizations to respond quickly to changing market conditions and customer needs.

Overall, understanding Lean-Agile principles is very valuable for leaders who want to help their organizations become more effective and competitive.

Domain and Technological Knowledge

Having domain knowledge means having a deep understanding of the industry or field in which the organization operates, as well as the specific skills needed and functions performed by the teams under the leader’s authority. This can help leaders make informed decisions, anticipate trends and challenges, and stay ahead of the competition.

For example, a leader in the technology industry needs to understand the latest developments in software, hardware, and networking in order to make strategic decisions about the direction of the company.

Having technological knowledge, on the other hand, means having a general understanding of the latest technologies and how they can be applied to improve business operations. This can help leaders identify and implement new technologies that can drive innovation, increase efficiency, and improve customer satisfaction.

For example, a leader in the retail industry may need to understand the potential benefits and challenges of using artificial intelligence, blockchain, or the Internet of Things in order to make informed decisions about the company’s technology strategy.

Overall, having both domain knowledge and technological knowledge is crucial for leaders who want to be effective and successful in today’s dynamic business environment. It allows them to make informed and strategic decisions that can help their organizations stay competitive and achieve their goals.

Business Decision Making

Making effective business decisions is a crucial part of leadership. Leaders are often responsible for analyzing complex information, identifying key issues and challenges, and choosing the best course of action to achieve the organization’s goals.

To make good business decisions, leaders need to have a combination of skills and abilities. For example, they may need to be able to:

• Analyze data and information to identify trends, patterns, and opportunities
• Understand the organization’s mission, vision, and values, and align decision making with these principles
• Consider the potential risks and benefits of different courses of action
• Communicate clearly and effectively with others to gather input, provide information, and build consensus
• Make difficult decisions in a timely and confident manner, even when there is uncertainty or disagreement

In the end, the purpose of all the other aspects of Intelligence is to support making effective business decisions that will benefit the organization.

C – Curious

The final aspect of being a POETIC leader is to be curious. This quality works hand-in-hand with intelligence to support a continuous learning culture in the organization, and an environment that values exploration, experimentation, and innovation. All of these qualities, in turn, support the principle of continuous improvement, which is at the heart of Lean-Agile values.

Exploring

Curious leaders are constantly searching for new information, new experiences, and new perspectives. They are often driven by a strong desire to learn and understand the world around them.

As a result, they will remain on top of industry trends, new advancements or best practices that can be applied to the business decisions they make.

Without this quality, leaders can quickly stagnate, halting their teams’ progress as well.

Experimental

Curious leaders embed an experimental mindset in their organization—a culture of forming hypotheses, designing experiments, and evaluating the data from the experiment. The results of the experiments can inform future design, strategies and products.

Experimentation is another core principle of the Lean-Agile methodology: short, iterative production combined with a strong feedback loop supports continuous improvement in both the quality of the product and the efficiency of the process.

Encouraging experimentation relies heavily on the psychological safety we discussed previously because team members—and the leader themselves—need to feel comfortable with taking calculated risks and potentially making mistakes in the name of improvement.

Innovation

Closely related to experimentation is the idea of innovation, which is vital to organizational success in today’s lightning-fast competitive environment.

Curious leaders are open-minded and receptive to new ideas and feedback; they’re not afraid to ask questions, challenge assumptions, and try new things in order to gain a deeper understanding of the situation or a problem.

This can often help them identify and solve complex challenges and come up with creative and innovative solutions. And it can often allow them to enable their teams to be creative and come up with innovative solutions. Curious leaders often:

• Identify and prioritize opportunities for innovation, based on the organization’s goals and the market environment
• Communicate a clear vision and strategy for innovation, and align the organization’s resources and efforts towards achieving it
• Encourage and support experimentation and risk-taking, and provide the necessary resources and support to enable innovation to flourish
• Foster a culture of collaboration, communication, and continuous learning, and provide opportunities for team members to develop their skills and knowledge
• Monitor and manage the progress of innovation initiatives, and make adjustments as needed to ensure their success

Learning and the Growth Mindset

Curious leaders are lifelong learners who constantly seek new opportunities to learn and grow. They might be interested in a wide range of subjects—from their own industry or field, to the arts, the sciences, and many other disciplines. This allows them to bring diverse and well rounded perspectives to their leadership role. And, it encourages their teams to follow that example, promoting a growth mindset.

Teams permeated by a growth mindset believe that they can improve and develop their skills and abilities through effort and learning. They see challenges as opportunities to grow and learn, rather than as threats or setbacks. This approach helps leaders stay open to new ideas and approaches, and enables them to adapt and respond effectively to changing circumstances.

Having a growth mindset can also help leaders foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement within their team or organization. By modeling a growth mindset themselves, leaders can inspire others to adopt this perspective and approach to their work. This can lead to a more innovative and adaptable team or organization, which can be better equipped to meet the challenges and opportunities of an ever-changing world.

Gemba

Curious leaders often want to go and experience what’s really happening in the world and the workplace for themselves.

A great technique for curious leaders is gemba, a Japanese term that means “the place” where value is created and work is done. For leaders it is the practice of going to the ‘gemba’ to observe and understand the work processes and identify opportunities for improvement.

Gemba is not about getting status updates. By going to the gemba and seeing firsthand how work is being done, leaders can gain valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the current process and identify opportunities for streamlining, efficiency, and continuous improvement.

Additionally, going to the gemba can help Agile leaders build trust and credibility with their teams by showing that they are willing to roll up their sleeves and get involved. Overall, going to the Gemba is an important part of being an effective Agile leader.

Summary

To lead Lean-Agile organizations, the culture leaders create is the most valuable thing they can work on.

In this article, we have summarized some of the key techniques and practices for Lean-Agile leaders to be aware of: POETIC Leadership. Not all leaders will be great at everything. But making sure they have a good balance of all six aspects will build a strong foundation for success.

How POETIC are you?

To better understand these concepts and support your and your organization’s leadership abilities, explore our value-based, experiential learning courses for leadership development.

The concept of “Agile” has been tied to software development mainly because of the 2001 publication, The Manifesto for Agile Software Development (a.k.a. the “Agile Manifesto”) which popularized this idea. Written by a group of software professionals, this artifact helped many teams apply a new way of working, which arguably revolutionized the way software applications are designed and delivered.

What is not commonly known is that the philosophy and values behind this Manifesto originated decades ago from manufacturing; Toyota Motors was the very first organization that conceived values such as short feedback loops, optimize flow of work, limiting work-in-progress, etc. This also means that the concepts and practices of Agile can be applied to almost any type of work that you do – from recruiting to marketing to business development, Agile practices can accelerate the delivery of nearly any product or service.

This sounds too good to be true, correct? Let’s take a closer look at a few examples of how Agile techniques can be applied to non-software projects.

Agile is NOT just for software?!

In my experience working with Agile teams over the past few years, I discovered a trend that is somewhat surprising – many people believe that “Agile” is synonymous to “Scrum”, which is not the case. This misconception has often led to the belief that if you want to “do Agile”, you must “do Scrum”, or apply Scrum-like practices. This is simply not the case. It is very possible to apply Agile principles and practices without adhering to the guidelines offered by the Scrum framework. Why does this matter, you may wonder. This is an interesting take on the Agile approach because you can apply Agile practices without practicing all of the events that Scrum requires, which means that Agile is potentially much simpler than you imagined!

How to apply Agile techniques even if you are not developing software

Here are a few practices (and questions) to consider when you are working on a non-software/non-technical project:

Start with what you do now

There is no need to abandon everything you do today for the sake of “doing Agile”. It is entirely possible (and likely) that many of the processes and/or tools that you are using today provide value and are quite effective, even if you have a desire to improve what you do now. It is absolutely okay to keep many of the tools and procedures that are already in place. The trick is to explore what makes sense to change. More on that shortly.

Consider where your pain-points are

What is keeping you or your team up at night? Where are the inefficiencies? What do your customers complain about the most? These are all questions that could lead to interesting insights if you dig a little deeper and spend some time to assess the root cause. These repetitive issues will likely provide you with a great starting point to apply Agile methods. A few examples are: long feedback cycles, lack of visibility into state of tasks and/or projects, quality issues, scope/requirements creep, etc.

What work can you complete in a short period of time?

Looking at the work your team is doing, how can you break down the work into smaller units? This may take a bit of experimentation, but if you can deconstruct work into less complex pieces, you could improve your ability to deliver a working solution more quickly, thus giving your customer an earlier view and the opportunity to provide feedback.

How often does your team reflect on how they collaborate?

When was the last time they thought about how to improve their processes and/or tools? Agile way of working is inherently iterative in nature, which means there should be natural checkpoints for the team to inspect their way of working and make adjustments as needed. The mindset of continuous improvement is not always easy for teams to adopt, but it will provide benefits once the team can establish a healthy routine of regularly reviewing how they work together.

How much work is your team trying to do at the same time?

Multi-tasking is a big “no no” in Agile because it takes away focus and erodes customer confidence when you start a lot of work but finish very little. Limiting your “WIP”, or Work In Progress, is one of the key tenets of Agile that is often forgotten. Reducing your WIP sounds easy enough to do, but it is often quite difficult for most of us who are accustomed to doing so, and it will require practice and persistence.

How often do you showcase your work to the customer?

Providing visibility and being transparent about successes and failures is not always easy, especially if you have a demanding customer who is used to getting what they ask for. A key tenet of Agile is close collaboration with the customer, which means partnering with them and being open and honest about everything. Again, not always easy to do, but it will build trust and confidence over time if you can work with the initial challenges.

Conclusion

In closing, you may have noticed that in this article, I did not suggest any technical practices that are specifically related to any Agile framework. While some of these ideas may feel a bit vague and general, I am hoping that you can find a real-world project with which you can try some of these techniques. You can see that none of these approaches are specifically intended for software projects, which means they can be applied to just about any type of project that you are working on. My final recommendation: choose a project that is not too small but not mission-critical so that you can apply one or two of these methods as an experiment. If you can make a commitment to giving this a try, I guarantee that you will learn something unexpected.

This is the second in a three-part series of articles covering the POETIC Leadership approach to Lean-Agile leadership, authored by Alex Gray, a Lean Agile Practice Lead at Cprime. Click below to visit Parts One and Three:

• Part One: Personal and Organizational

• Part Three: Intelligent and Curious

In the first article of this series, we discussed why organizations that wish to employ Lean-Agile methods must promote a culture that supports that way of working. And, we began discussing what that culture looks like and how they can develop it—first on a personal level, then organizationally.

We recommend reviewing that article first, if you haven’t already, to get some context for what we’ll be discussing in this article: the emotional and team thinking components of the POETIC Leadership model.

E – Emotional

Emotion should not rule decision making, especially for leaders. However, it would be detrimental to overlook the importance of how emotion plays into productivity, employee engagement, and operational effectiveness. Hence the emphasis placed on Emotional Intelligence in recent years. In developing a culture that supports Lean-Agile ways of working, an effective leader will focus on fostering deep respect for people, emotional empathy, and psychological safety.

Deep Respect For People

Emotional Leaders have a deep respect for people, which in turn creates a positive and supportive working environment and a culture of trust and collaboration within the organization.

Having emotional awareness sends a message that leaders value the contributions and the perspectives of each individual. This can help to build trust and rapport, and make employees feel valued and supported.

Deep respect for people can also help leaders create more inclusive and diverse workplaces, and to foster a sense of belonging among employees. This can lead to increased job satisfaction, improved morale and better performance.

Emotional Empathy

Effective leaders show emotional empathy, which is the ability to understand and share the emotions of others. It requires them to recognize the emotional state of another person and to respond to that emotion in a way that is appropriate and helpful.

People who have high levels of emotional empathy are often good at making others feel understood and supported, and can build strong emotional connections with others. This can be a valuable skill for leaders as it can help them build trust and rapport with their team members and create a positive, supportive working environment.

Psychological Safety

Leaders with strong emotional intelligence create a workplace and environment that embodies psychological safety.

Psychological safety refers to a workplace environment in which individuals feel comfortable expressing themselves and their ideas without fear of retribution or negative consequences. This type of environment is typically characterized by trust, respect and inclusiveness, and it allows the team members to take risks and make mistakes without fear of being punished or ostracized.

Psychological safety is important because it really allows team members to fully engage with their work and to contribute their best ideas and efforts. It also improves collaboration, encourages creativity, and improves overall performance within the team and the organization.

T – Team thinking

Another aspect of effective leadership in a Lean-Agile environment is a mindset that revolves around the team as a unit, in addition to the individuals who make it up. This involves both the leader’s attitude and thought process and that of the team members themselves. Factors to consider include team motivation, team ownership, decentralization of decision making, and a focus on long-lived teams.

Team Motivation

Team Thinking leaders understand the value of creating and motivating teams. Agile teams are typically self-motivated, autonomous, and take responsibility for the work they’re doing. However, there are a few ways that a leader can motivate the team and help them stay engaged and committed to the work.

First, leaders should provide clear goals and objectives, and regularly communicate with team members about their progress towards meeting those goals. This can help team members to stay focused and motivated, and to understand how their work contributes to the overall success of the organization.

Leaders should recognize and reward the contributions of team members towards team goals. This can include praising individuals for their hard work and achievements, and providing opportunities for professional development and growth.

Overall, the key to motivating agile teams is to provide the support and resources they need to own their work, and to recognize and reward their contributions to the success of the organization.

Team Ownership

Team Thinking Leaders need to help create team ownership.

Team ownership refers to the idea that the team handles all aspects of product development from start to finish. This includes defining goals and objectives, developing roadmaps and strategies to achieve those goals, and taking ownership of the work to complete the product.

Team ownership is important because it allows teams to become flexible and adaptable, to respond quickly to challenges and changes, and to promote the ongoing need for collaboration within the team. This helps build trust and rapport among the team members.

To foster a sense of team ownership, leaders should encourage team members to take on leadership roles at all levels and to make decisions about their work. Leaders should provide the needed support and resources, and create an environment in which the team members feel valued. This can help build a strong sense of ownership and can then lead to improved performance and more successful outcomes.

Decentralized Decision Making

Leaders who employ Team Thinking also need to embrace decentralized decision-making. Not all decisions need to be made by leaders. Often, the teams and the team members closest to the situation have more knowledge and expertise to decide. Leaders need to create clear goals, objectives, guidelines, and frameworks for decision-making.

Decentralized decision-making can help to create more agile and responsive organizations, which leads to improved performance and more successful outcomes and can empower teams. This doesn’t mean the team makes all decisions, but they should make those that are frequent and where the teams have the best knowledge and understanding.

Long Lived Teams

Team Thinking leaders need to understand the value of long-lived teams. In Lean-Agile organizations, we aim to have long-lived teams working on long-lived products.

Long-lived teams are really valuable because they can help organizations save time and money by reducing the need to constantly form and disband teams for different work. It can lead to more consistent and high-quality outcomes as team members become more familiar with each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and can work together more efficiently.

Furthermore, long-lived teams can provide a sense of stability and support for team members, which can lead to improved morale and job satisfaction. This, in turn, leads to better retention of top talent, and more committed and engaged employees.

Overall, long-lived teams can provide organizations with several benefits, including improved collaboration, decision-making cost savings, and increased job satisfaction amongst their team members.

Join us again for the third and final article in this series where we’ll discuss the last two aspects of POETIC Leadership: Intelligent and Curious.

This is the first in a three-part series of articles covering the POETIC Leadership approach to Lean-Agile leadership, authored by Alex Gray, a Lean Agile Practice Lead at Cprime. Click below to visit Parts Two and Three:

• Part Two: Emotional and Team Thinking

• Part Three: Intelligent and Curious

In Lean-Agile environments, the organizational culture must support Lean and Agile ways of working.

In the context of these articles, we will use the following definitions:

• Lean-Agile environments: organizations, products, or teams who do, or desire to follow Lean and Agile practices
• Culture: How do we do things, and how our people react to events

Without a supporting culture, any Lean-Agile adoption is likely to stay overly formal or limited to localized success. But, with the right supporting culture, the benefits of Lean and Agile can permeate the organization, creating better flow, increased efficiency, greater innovation, and the delivery of real customer value.

In the 2022 State of Agile Report, the survey shows that culture, leadership, and consistency are three key challenges in the way of successful Agile adoption in an organization.

To solve these problems, the culture needs to change. But, that’s a tricky concept.

John Seddon, an occupational psychologist and author, explains, “Attempting to change an organization’s culture is a folly, it always fails. People’s behavior (the culture) is a product of the system; when you change the system, people’s behavior changes.”

The Systems Thinking definition of a system is, “an entity with interrelated and interdependent parts; it is defined by its boundaries and it is more than the sum of its parts.”

Organizations are systems made up of people, teams, departments, services, tools, processes, products, and many other interconnected parts.

Leaders define these systems. So, to create a culture that supports Lean-Agile adoption, successful leaders must understand what it means to work in an agile way so they can help design and lead their system to be as Lean and Agile as it can be. These leaders can exist at all levels of the organization. But all of them must display a set of skills and capabilities that they can use to catalyze, enable, and support the process of system-level change.

They need POETIC Leadership:

Personal

• Self-awareness
• Mindfulness
• Powerful influencing
• Leadership style

Organizational

• Organizational structure

Emotional

• Deep respect for people
• Emotional empathy
• Psychological safety

Team Thinking

• Team motivation
• Team ownership
• Decentralized decision making
• Long lived teams

Intelligent

• IQ
• Lean-Agile
• Business decision making
• Domain knowledge

Curious

• Exploring
• Experimental
• Innovation
• Learning
• Growth mindset
• GEMBA

In this article, we will focus on the first two aspects of POETIC Leadership. To explore more, read parts two and three:

• Part Two: Emotional and Team Thinking (link coming soon)
• Part Three: Intelligent and Curious (link coming soon)

P – Personal Leadership

Personal Leadership involves how leaders act among the people they lead, and the impression their actions leave. Done well, it is leading by example. This is really important because it demonstrates the behavior the leader expects from everyone else. Personal leaders encourage strong stakeholder engagement, which is built through continuous communication to build trust, commitment, innovation and collaboration. When leaders exhibit the qualities and characteristics they want to see in their teams, they can inspire and motivate others to do the same. Team members develop trust and confidence, and are much more likely to follow an authentic leader.

Self-awareness

Leadership requires self-awareness. Good leaders have a conscious understanding of their character, behaviors, motives, and how these things affect their leadership abilities. To show self-awareness, leaders must understand their own strengths and weaknesses, so there is real value in spending time to research for yourself what you know, and what you don’t know. A common technique to help with this is Johari’s Window.

As a leader, knowing the areas that are unknown to you:

• Helps you focus on developing the skills and abilities that are most important to your role
• Helps you understand the impact your words and actions might have on others
• Guides your decision-making and subsequent actions
• Makes you more aware of the potential risks and uncertainties around a situation or decision
• Helps you to communicate more effectively and avoid causing harm or conflict
• Helps you build and maintain good relationships with your teams
• Helps you know when others are in a better position to make certain decisions

People are more likely to trust and respect leaders who are self-aware, and can show empathy and understanding.

Mindfulness

Effective leaders are mindful and intentional. Mindfulness is the practice of bringing your attention to the present moment without judgment. It involves paying attention to your thoughts, feelings, and sensations, and letting go of judgment and preconceptions.

The goal of mindfulness is to create and cultivate a greater sense of awareness and understanding of yourself, the world around you, and how that might impact your team members. Mindfulness mitigates reactive tendencies—a serious barrier to effective leadership. Some leaders lash out, others shut down, while some “go along to get along.”

Powerful Influencing

Leaders can have great power in organizations (often exhibited by a “command and control” leadership style). On the other hand, in an agile context, leaders should be powerful influencers; someone that supports physiological safety and who can use their ability to influence the thoughts, beliefs, and actions of others without always having to tell them what to do. If a leader is constantly telling people what to do or how to do it, the teams are always going to revert to that leader and ask them what to do. If a leader can use influence to get others to decide how to do things by themselves, then they’re going to create greater autonomy, which supports agility.

Leadership Style

Finally, knowing your personal leadership style is important because it can really help you understand your strengths and weaknesses as a leader. This, in turn, lets you adapt your approach to leadership when different situations and team members benefit from different leadership styles and no one style is necessarily better than the other. The key is understanding the different styles and where you fit in the spectrum.

Some common leadership styles are:

• Transformational leadership: Transformational leaders inspire and motivate others to achieve their full potential. They focus on creating a vision and a sense of purpose, and on empowering team members to take ownership and responsibility for their work.
• Servant leadership: Servant leaders prioritize the needs and well-being of their team members. They put the interests of the team ahead of their own and focus on supporting and empowering others to succeed.
• Charismatic leadership: Charismatic leaders are magnetic and inspiring. They have a natural ability to engage and motivate others, and they often have a strong personal following.
• Autocratic leadership: Autocratic leaders have a high level of control and decision-making power. They make decisions independently and expect their team members to follow orders without question.
• Democratic leadership: Democratic leaders involve their team members in decision making and encourage collaboration and open communication. They value the input and perspectives of others and strive to create a participatory and inclusive work environment.

O – Organizational

Organizational Leadership involves understanding how to align the organization to strategic vision and goals, and to create the right structure to deliver value to our customers and business effectively and efficiently.

Lean

Organizational Leadership uses Lean Thinking, which is a philosophy that emphasizes the continuous improvement of a process, the elimination of waste, and the optimization of efficiency in order to provide the highest possible value to customers. It involves empowering employees to promote transparency, identify and address in-efficiency in their work, and encourage a culture of continuous improvement within the organization. This can help leaders to create more agile and responsive organizations that are better able to adapt to changing market conditions and customer needs.

Value Stream Mapping

Organizational Leaders want to improve the flow of value through the organization. Value stream thinking is a fundamental mindset a leader needs for business success. A Lean Thinking technique leaders may use to improve the flow of work is Value Stream Mapping.

Karen Martin describes Value Stream Mapping as a practical and highly effective way to see and resolve disconnects, redundancies, and gaps in how work gets done. It involves creating a high-level diagram or map of all the key components of the production process—from requirements gathering to product delivery. The goal of value stream mapping is to quickly identify bottlenecks, ways to improve the flow of work, and non-value activities. Acting on these findings results in a reduction in cycle-time, which improves the delivery of value to your customers.

This could be a simple change in process, or you may need to redefine entire organizational structures. It can involve complex decisions, but making those decisions yields valuable benefits.

Organizational Structure

A Lean-Agile organizational structure is designed to be nimble, flexible, responsive, and adaptable. It is based upon the principles of Agile and Lean, including

• customer collaboration
• iterative and adaptive planning
• a value-centric approach
• continuous improvement

It may include product focused teams that are

• self managing
• cross functional
• possibly with a flat hierarchy with fewer levels of management
• empowered to make decisions and take ownership of their work

Lean-Agile organizations are designed to be fast-paced, respond to changes in the market and customer needs, and enable innovation. The goal of designing organizational structures is to enable efficient product delivery, and support collaboration, quick decision-making, and learning.

Systems Thinking

Organizational Leaders will leverage Systems Thinking, a way of thinking and a problem-solving approach that focuses on understanding how parts of their systems interact and influence each other, and how the system behaves and develops over time. It recognizes that systems comprise people, processes, organization structures, hierarchies, tools, and many other items that are all interconnected.

As a leader, you need to look at the big picture and consider the long-term consequences of decisions and actions in your systems; anticipate what might change and manage these complex interactions between systems. You need to be open-minded, curious, proactive, and able to adapt and learn from what is happening in your systems.

In Part Two of this series, we will address two more aspects of POETIC Leadership: Emotional and Team Thinking.

Read Part Two now!