When agile will not stick!
The classic trend I see over and over again is waterfall disguised as Agile. A true Agilist would probably disagree… I actually do not think this is necessarily a bad approach. Anything that inches towards gaining agility, accelerating decision making and supporting capability shift has to be a good thing, right? A series of small incremental changes leads to big impacts.
The key Agile premise to uphold at all cost is - to iterate. Small continually integrated components of delivery that reduce the inherent risk and allow quicker feedback and delivery to the end customer.
However, teams are not islands, they need Organisational supporting structures around them to be successful.
As you embark on this journey there are some clear warning signs to look out for that mean teams are not set up for success:
WARNING!!!
Teams have too much work in progress (WIP) and no clear way to prioritise
Interdependencies with other teams is not well understood or synchronised
Product Owner is not 100% dedicated to validating scope, maintaining cadence and synchronisation and removing the teams blockers
The sprint excludes system showcase
Program incremental planning is not established which makes it difficult for teams to pivot when necessary
The above are symptomatic of a deeper root cause. Many of which require business model innovation as well as agility practices and techniques.
Many of these gotchas unfortunately result in teams falling back to waterfall in the disguise of agile and reinforce a waterfall mindset. Often we end up blaming the process when things don’t go right.
Unfortunately Agile in itself can reinforce some of these behaviours as, in my opinion, Agile focuses heavily on delivery execution rather than enabling execution.
Agile teams will only be successful if the appropriate amount of decomposition, solutioning and planning is invested in to feed teams an appropriately curated and sequenced MVP. This does not in any way mean heavy weight planning. Just the right amount which will be continually revisited as more information becomes available.
This is why as an organisation we have been very specific in regards to the methods and frameworks we adopt in our teachings and promote through our consultancy work. They are specifically selected to assist in resolving these common areas of concern and help to accelerate delivery and a mindset of agility and innovation.
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