Because if you are going on an Agile journey, whether its to run a few projects differently, or to transform your business culture, you are going to disrupt some internal eco systems. And that’s a good thing….
Agile calls for a fundamentally different way of doing things, requiring a fundamentally different way of thinking about things. All with the intent of delivering a materially different set of outcomes. If you are doing that properly, you are going to break some stuff in any established business.
Wherever I have implemented Agile, coached it, or watched it from afar, good implementations have created many points of friction. Friction isn’t bad, in fact it can be an indicator of progress. But you do have to watch for it, and you do have to manage it. Although sometimes it’s ok to let the friction start a fire, because something important is impeding the change and needs to be changed.
So here are some Points of Friction (PoF) you should see if you are doing things well.
In the Team
An easy one first. Lets assume that the Story Cards have clear specific Definitions of Done, were prepared by the team and everyone is clear on card, sprint, and milestone goals. As an aside, these are assumptions that make an “ass” out of “u” and “me” more often than not in Agile teams. Anyway, lets assume we have those basics sorted.
So you start standing up and iterating. Depending on the underlying culture there may be some friction from the team in general. Anxiety about how it’s going to work, and ‘how will it affect me?’. This generally dissipates fairly quickly with decent coaching support as the team starts to see the potential.
But there is one group of people, irrespective of your underlying culture, who will hate Agile with a passion. The underperformers. No longer can they hide behind a fortnightly timesheet and a hail of excuses. Their non-delivery will be in the white-hot spotlight every single day. Relentless, brutal, unambiguous exposure; and everyone in the team will see.
This is the first and most important PoF to be dealt with. It is imperative that the Leader be ready for it, and deals quickly. Whether that’s training (if it’s a skills issue) or a fast exit if the problem is toxic underperformance (lies, laziness, accountability dodging, malicious disruption etc).
If the leader deals, the team engagement goes though the roof, and you are on your way. If not, you will entrench mediocrity, and cripple the value of Agile as you move forward.
Remember, at its heart Agile strives for early identification of issues and rapid resolution. Agile practices will expose personnel issues fast; you will need to deal with them rapidly, or lose the game at the first hurdle.
Leaders in Delivery
For Agile to work in a large complex organisation, teams need to form around the work. And teams need to be cross-functional, skills from across the organisation need to be embedded, along with the customer too. So you will end up with a matrix.
Leaders who measure their success on the size of headcount and budgets are going to struggle. Particularly those who whine ‘how can I be accountable for delivery without direct accountability (control) of my bit!’. This is a massive shift for some organisations, so it becomes a critical PoF with the very leadership system itself.
Ignore this at your peril. If you are commencing an Agile journey its critical to recognise that you are going to need a change in behaviours amongst your delivery leaders. They need to move from turf protection to collaborative prioritisation and allocation of resources without fear or favour to the highest priority projects, and to provide direct leadership to work for which they are taking the lead and situational leadership to support initiatives where they are not.
You need leaders who thrive in ambiguity, and have the interests of the overall goals at heart. In the short term you need to recognise it, call it and define the target behaviours. In the medium term, it will impact your recruiting, and recognition and rewards systems.
If you don’t lubricate this PoF it will become a slog for any Agile team, battling to build cross functional team, and garner the leadership support they need to remove blockers and support delivery.
Executive Sponsors
Two key PoF for this group.
Firstly, letting go of the quest for certainty is a major challenge for most Execs. If the delivery or customer Execs cannot get past accepting that at the beginning of a new complex piece of work that the answer to the question ‘how much will it cost and how long will it take’ is ‘we don’t know’, then you have a big PoF. If allowed to run, it will drive waterfall behaviours in the team no matter the sophistication of the practices, or the excellence of the culture. The follow on conversation from ‘we don’t know’ is: ‘and nobody knows, not me, not the best PM in the world, and certainly not the vendor guaranteeing you fixed price delivery over a bottle of Grange’. You have to convince your Exec that there is less risk in making an educated top down guess for your business case than attempting a bottom up estimate when you have 2% of the knowledge available to do that with any accuracy. The risk with the latter is that it generates a false sense of security because of a perceived level of science. The bottom up estimate has no more validity than the guess, but in guessing we are acknowledging that we expect it to be wrong. And that’s drives a more realistic assessment of risk, and sets expectations more appropriately around cost and time. Once Execs have been through a couple of projects this is much less of a problem. When they experience the growing confidence of the team, burn down charts showing actual progress and the resulting increasing predictability, along with the realtime feedback from the embedded customer who is participating in problem solving, getting past this PoF is much easier. But first time, courageous conversations will required to give the team the space to build velocity, and not be distracted with pointless estimating exercises.
The second PoF is that in most organisations, unless something has gone badly pear shaped, that Execs only get involved at the monthly steering committee. Agile teams need real time input to remove blockers. I’ve written about this aspect in previous articles so I won’t labour it here, other than to say that velocity will pick up much faster if Execs are prepared to support the team by attending showcases and leaning into the occasional standup and retrospective.
Customer Leaders in Delivery
“We need your best subject matter experts embedded in the project full time”
“Our best people full time?!?!”
This PoF is perennial. This project is critical to my business’ success, it’s do or die, but there is no way I can commit my best people to it. Huh? My response as a delivery Exec was simple. No commitment of the right people, no project. Your best people will end up on this project whether you like it or not, we can wait until our green project is 80% though and suddenly goes red and we are scrambling to salvage it, or we can do it now and have a predictable, transparent, collaborative project delivery.
Product Owner choice is critical. An Agile team is like a rowing team. Over time they will perform faster and faster, and the Product Owner (along with other subject matter experts from the business) are like the cox. Wrong cox and the team will row the boat onto the rocks at a 100 miles an hour.
Peer Teams
Hardest one last. I’ve long been an advocate for Agile for the whole organisation, but a pragmatic deep not wide approach at the start.
If you’ve got past the all the above-mentioned PoF and the team is starting to accelerate at a rate of knots, the problem that will occur very quickly in some cases is that supporting teams and other parts of the organisation that need to deliver to, or respond to the team ….. don’t. Or at least not in a way and with the speed necessary to build the team’s velocity.
If I could deliver a formula to deal with this problem that was simple and consistently worked, I’d be writing from my yacht in the Bahamas. There is no simple answer. Communication, patience and tolerance will be key. This PoF may point you to the next area to attack with Agile, you might have to be creative, creating exception processes as an interim, and in some cases you might just have to accept that the problem is intractable in the short term.
But if this PoF leads to a fire, it might not be a bad thing in the long run.
Conclusion
There are plenty more PoF: risk management, portfolio reporting, capital management to name a few. But this article is already too long.
Those mentioned above are really common, and critical to be managed if you are to be successful.
Don’t be concerned if you are seeing these and more in your Agile journey, its all part of the rich tapestry of Agile transformation.
If you are seeing no friction…. be afraid …… be very afraid.