If you’re currently transitioning, or thinking about transitioning to an agile framework the level of differing views from agile industry professionals can be overwhelming. There is certainly a lot often contrasting opinions with what works and what doesn’t, including how you define agile / scrum / SAFe /kanban etc etc.
What happened to the discussion on what great delivery looks like?
We seem to have gotten carried away with what good agile looks like. Who cares! We need to centre the focus back on what great delivery looks like. Not how you define agile, or scrum, or SAFe, or Kanban.
So for the purpose of this article we’re going to leave agile/scrum/SAFe/kanban at the door and just breakdown what our version of what great delivery looks like. With over 50 years experience advising, designing, and executing delivery in complex multinational organisation, we think we have a pretty good idea.
These are some of our tips for embedding a great delivery culture:
1. Build in visibility & transparency of the work & the system
If you can’t see it, you can’t fix it. Centralising all of the work in the system allows us to set a baseline on the state of delivery, and vitally gives transparency of the work in flight and what is being planned. As part of doing this, you start improving your game on the collaboration front and start indicating accountability of the work that needs to be done.
Depending on the size of your portfolio of work, organisational complexity, and reporting requirements the toolset you choose can make a big difference. If you’re a small to mid tier organisation we’d recommend Monday.com or Atlassian JIRA. If you’re a big complex organisation you might want to consider a toolset like Broadcoms ValueOps stack, namely Clarity at the investment layer and Rally at the execution layer.
2. Accountability at all levels is a must have
Driving accountability is going to present benefits on multiple levels. Enabling accountability with your people requires empowering people to make decisions on the work they own, but also the safety & space to learn from the inevitable mistakes they make (and develop the remedies not to be made again).
Lets not forget that decentralised decisions means that you will benefit from reduced wait times for leadership responses to come back to teams that know the most about the work, so you will see velocity improvements just on this point!
And most importantly, when you have an accountable team you have a motivated team (heading in the right direction to a high performing team). Motivated to turn up each day for each other, for themselves, and your customers.
3. Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate. And then collaborate some more
Great leadership demonstrates how teams should be working together, both internally & externally, day in day
out. People naturally want to collaborate if they feel there is value they can add and they’re going to be listened to. I’ve seen this work incredibly well for smaller, incrementally released work and also incredibly bad for large & complex pieces of work that often entails large numbers of people in a working group.
This isn’t about getting people in meetings all day, in fact we want to reduce meetings as much as possible.
There are some amazing collaboration & work management tools in the market that have powerful features available that can help keep people out of meetings but get the answers they need to keep moving. Setting up the right ground rules for daily updates will also mean people remain engaged, get help on anything that’s blocking them, and collaborate.
4. Chop work up and release in smaller, more simple batches
This is often easier said than done and requires people to think about value delivery in a different way. What makes this even more challenging is asking teams to break down work into smaller components when they are under a huge amount of pressure to deliver. Why? (you ask) because when people are under pressure to deliver they revert to what they know, they’re not willing to experiment for fear of failure to meet their schedule.
The velocity improvement & predictability improvements alone here are worth the time and focus on improving this aspect. Not only are you getting value back to your customers faster, but you are also reducing the risk of waste through poor collaboration, complexity, and reduced quality.
5. Appropriate risk management
Great risk management is part of any great delivery model. Depending on the initiative & the industry you operate in you will need to manage risks appropriate to their risk profile & estimated impacts. This shouldn’t change under any delivery framework, but what can change is the level of visibility, accountability, and collaboration for identifying and managing risks, and importantly applying the right level of capacity management for mitigation strategies.
Great risk management is part of any great delivery model. Depending on the initiative & the industry you operate in you will need to manage risks appropriate to their risk profile & estimated impacts. This shouldn’t change under any delivery framework, but what can change is the level of visibility, accountability, and collaboration for identifying and managing risks, and importantly applying the right level of capacity management for mitigation strategies.
Wrapping up...
Above all, the path to great delivery starts & ends with great leadership. If we place the focus on frameworks to one side and instead focus on what the vision for great delivery looks like in your organisation, and what is getting in the way of achieving that vision, then we can pick what we need from frameworks to help resolve the problem, not the other way around.
So, let’s leave all the agile/scrum/SAFe/kanban squabbles to the industry commentators and focus on fixing what stands in the way of great delivery, which will differ for all organisations. And if you want to talk more about the problems you’re facing into, what we’ve covered in this article, or simply want a shoulder to cry on, please get in touch.
Nick Wallis
Nick is a Co-Founder, Director, & Principal Consultant with The Agility Concept and has 15+ years experience in project delivery and transformation & change across a variety of industries including Banking, Mining, & Government. Nick is also a certified SAFe Program Consultant (SPC) and has advised & coached leaders from some of Australia’s most well known organisations in value stream management, operating models, lean portfolio management. agile ways of working, scrum, offering game changing program & project delivery insights.
