Does Hybrid Agile Work?

Posted on June 14, 2014 by jokoro12 — Leave a comment

In working with many companies, and talking with many of my colleagues (both Agilists, and non-Agile IT practitioners) the topic of Agile hybrids comes up frequently.  People ask whether it is okay to use Agile and waterfall side-by-side in the same organisation.  My answer to this comes in several parts.

First of all hybrids, while not ideal are a fact of life.  There are many companies that have transitioned their mobile projects for example to Agile, but legacy system projects are still done using a waterfall process.  Now, surely this is not ideal, it is much easier to adopt one methodology and stick with it consistently across an organisation.  However, not every organisation can adopt Agile in one fell swoop.  Instead it is sometimes necessary to move more slowly from traditional project management methods to Agile methods.

Second, there are some governance and regulatory requirements that companies are faced with, that in many cases require some traditional project methodology to be followed in the organisation.  This may be audit requirements for government, or process requirements in order to comply with the requirements of an industry standard.  This may also be a project lifecycle or method that is deeply ingrained in the company or organisation that will take time to change.  Whatever the case for the short term the organisation is forced to maintain some traditional project management process even while they transition to Agile.

Third, it is common for an organisation to see one of several scenarios internally that may cause them to deal with an Agile hybrid environment.  One scenario is where the company works with vendors who are using Agile methodology while the company is using traditional methods or vice-versa.  Another scenario is where different projects within the same program or group are using different methods (i.e. some are using Agile, and some are using waterfall or traditional methods).  A third scenario is where the organisation has chosen to define a process that is part traditional and part Agile (I don’t suggest this unless it has really been well thought through, and there is a strong business driver not to fully change to an Agile approach).

Success Factors for working with a hybrid

So if you do find yourself dealing with an Agile hybrid in your organisation here are some things to keep in mind to make it successful.

1.  An Agile hybrid approach should be well though through, if it is haphazard and not well considered it is almost guaranteed to fail.  One example of an organisation that had thought through this well was a multi-national entertainment company I worked with.  Their PMO had defined a methodology that allowed for a constant project discovery and initiation phase, and then allowed each project to select either iterative (Agile) or traditional project execution (design – build – test).  The projects were then deployed and closed using traditional methodology.  Again while this is not ideal (Water-Scrum-Fall) it was well thought through, and to some degree was working for the organisation, though I believe they were still in the process of changing their project approach, and this was not the end-point.

2.  Identify what type of hybrid you are dealing with.  Is it a hybrid group or program, a hybrid due to an Agile vendor, or an intentionally hybrid internal process?  Your organisation should decide whether this hybrid is the end point, or if it is somewhere along the course of an Agile transformation journey.  Maybe you are only operating in this hybrid fashion until you can move your legacy teams to a Kanban based approach, or until it is politically viable to transition fully to Agile (yes ensuring a politically viable transition with minimal resistance is a valid reason to use a hybrid approach for a period of time before a full Agile transition can be completed).

3.  If you have operational projects that use a traditional methodology, or on-going project maintenance that uses an existing process consider using a Kanban approach.  A Kanban approach using continuous flow and Work in Process (WIP) limits can allow all of your projects to take an Agile / Lean approach while still using some of your existing processes that may be needed for regulatory compliance or other considerations.

What is really key is to decide whether a hybrid is an end in itself, or if is only a means to an end (i.e. becoming more / fully Agile).  I think there can be a valid case for using a hybrid for a period of time, but I believe that ideally it is best to use a hybrid approach as a vehicle to make your organisation more Agile.  A hybrid is best used when it is a tool that helps your organisation to move forward in its Agile journey.  I hope some of these considerations will help you as you think through using a hybrid approach in your organisation (or not).

Until next time,

John.

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Posted in Agile, agile enterprise, agile methodology, Agile Project Manager, Business Agility, hybrid Agile, Scrum

To Lead is Agile

Posted on June 9, 2014 by jokoro12 — Leave a comment

Attending the Scrum Alliance Regional Scrum Gathering in Shanghai (www.scrumgathering.cn) this week the opening Key Note by Harvey Wheaton from Scrum Alliance addressed the role of leaders in Agile. Historically there has been the perception that managers and leaders do not have a role in an Agile team. Harvey’s opening addressed some ways that leaders can be Agile.  I felt this was a very good opening to the conference as this is a topic that I am very passionate about.  I had many conversations with conference attendees, speakers, and business partners during the two days of the conference about the importance of leaders in Agile.

In both my own experience and that of many peers and colleagues I am aware of many Agile initiatives that never got off the ground because of a lack of leadership buy-in.  Ideally Scrum teams self-organize, but this often leaves managers and leaders feeling that they are left out.  The managers then often become reactive and in response oppose the Agile  project or completely shut it down.

A better model is to include leaders in Agile plans up front.  To make key leaders in the organisation fans and sponsors of the Agile program.  After all there needs to be someone to champion the cause of the Agile team with upper management, someone to express the significant business value of an Agile approach.  An example of business value delivered by Agile is discussed in a 2008 QSM Associates Agile Impact Report that indicated Agile leads to 25% increased productivity, 50% faster time to market, 83% stakeholder satisfaction, and 49% less cost.

Managers are also needed to help Agile team members to build a career path in the company, to track against budgets, to address legal contracts with vendors, and to help coordinate across large programs that include many Agile teams. Managers for example can help to foster Communities of Practice where developers, testers, UX Designers and others can collaborate across the organisation and help to elevate Agile practices.

When Agile teams and leaders collaborate the results can be exceptional and beautiful.  Software and products that are delivered to market quickly.  Business results in terms of more revenue for the company or organisation, happy teams, and servant leaders who grow to provide vision and support for their teams.  In this model everyone wins.  The key point for the Agile team here is that management and business leaders should be the Agile Team’s best friends, and not perceived as the the enemy of the Agile Team.

Until next time, have a great weekend from Shanghai,
John.

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Posted in Agile, Agile Adoption, agile business, Agile Manager, Agile Teams, Community of Practice, Leadership, Scrum, Servant Leadership

Welcome to Auspicious Agile

Posted on June 9, 2014 by jokoro12 — 2 Comments

Auspicious Agile is all about using Agile successfully in the Enterprise, in business, as a leader and adapting Agile methods for Asia.  So first a little background on me:  My name is John Okoro, I have worked in the technology and consulting space for nearly two decades, and have used Agile methods for roughly seven years.  I started my career working for a Big 6 consultancy (now Big 4) and have seen a wide range of projects in numerous industries.  Throughout my career I have been responsible for leading projects and teams.  In this blog I hope to bring insights that I have developed throughout my career, as well as valuable insights from the many colleagues and peers I have worked with along the way.

Agile as discussed here refers to the combined group of methods that derive from the Agile Manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org), Lean principles, and related methods.  These include but are not limited to:  Scrum, Kanban, XP, and SAFe.  One consistent theme that I have encountered with these and other Agile methods is the need for an approach to leverage Agile at all levels of the Enterprise (from teams up to executives).  The need for Agile leadership principles that align with the use of Agile methods (Servant Leadership, empowering teams, vision casting), and Agile business methods (Lean Start-up, Design Thinking) are also quite consistent.

Finally, Agile methods in Asia call for additional consideration in applying to different cultural contexts from those found in the US and the West.  There is often more hierarchy, and the pronounced need to approach Agile from both a Leadership and Team level to be successful.  Enterprises, in particular in China are often much larger with technology groups numbering in thousands instead of hundreds as is frequently seen in the West.  I hope to address these nuances and promote a fun and lively discussion on these topics as well.

I look forward to highlighting stories, cases, and insights each week that will help each Agile practitioner, agilist, and participant in this conversation to practice Auspicious Agile.  Have a great week ahead.  John.

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Posted in Agile, Agile Adoption, agile business, agile manifesto, agile methodology, Agile Scaling, Asia, Business Agility, China, Leadership, SAFe, Scrum, Servant Leadership

Why Should I use a Framework to Scale Agile?

Posted on June 9, 2014 by jokoro12 — Leave a comment

In my career and that of many Agile coaches and consultants that I have worked with scaling of Agile to the Enterprise level has come up while working with customers and companies.  The idea of scaling Agile is not new, but approaches to do this are quite honestly not very mature.  This question is frequently on the minds of IT and business leaders that I have worked with from Software VPs, to CIOs, VPs of PMO to business executives.  They hear about the benefits of Agile, maybe in an industry publication, or from a colleague or peer in industry.  But then the concern turns to how (and if) Agile can work in their enterprise, with hundreds or thousands of people and multiple locations (often in different countries and time zones).

Agile is well defined at a team level, Scrum, Kanban, and XP as well as other variants have been around for a long time, and there are many trained and skilled practitioners.  However, when it comes time to scale to say a company with development teams in the US, Asia, and Europe things become a little more unclear.  We can use Scrum-of-Scrums to scale up to handle multiple teams.  In terms of running the necessary programs, budgets, contracts, and team coordination there are allot of questions that generally are not prescribed by simply scaling using a Scrum-of-Scrums approach.  The team then enters uncharted territory for team level Agile.

In some smaller organisations that already use Lean Startup and related Agile practices this may not cause too much of a problem.  However for a large Financial Services, Entertainment, or Manufacturing multi-national this is much more of an issue.  How do they track the progress of multiple Agile teams?  How do they ensure that the budgets allocated by the executive team are being  well spent?  How do they have teams in multiple time zones 12 hours apart, or 8 hours apart work together in a stand-up?  The questions go on and on…

Basically in my experience enterprises end up making up an approach as they go along, a “home made” approach to scaling Agile.  While this is a road that enterprises can and do choose to go, it is not necessarily the best one.  I have been part of teams that have done this and it is quite stressful for the teams and the leaders, making it up as they go along.  I am sure this has caused many managers and execs quite a few sleepless nights worrying about what to do next, and if they will succeed at all.

Having recently spent time looking at several pre-defined approaches for enterprise Agile, such as DAD (http://disciplinedagiledelivery.wordpress.com/introduction-to-dad/), Agile Path (http://www.ebmgt.org/Agility-Path-Framework), SAFe (http://scaledagileframework.com/), LeSS, Spotify, and several others I think that in many cases it is a better approach for an enterprise to adopt or adapt an Enterprise Agile Framework rather than making up their own.  There are several reasons: First it saves companies time, second it allows managers and leaders to find something proven that other companies have used, and third enterprises can reference other companies, case studies, and practitioners for guidance.

Of the frameworks I have been impressed with SAFe as it matches allot of what I have seen when large companies have created functioning approaches to scaling Agile (for instance the Team, Program, and portfolio distinction within SAFe matches what I have seen in large enterprises).  I also like that there are many references to companies that are already using the framework, and there is a path to certification which I think is useful for enterprises.

In fairness, I have spent more time working with SAFe recently than any of the other Agile Scaling Frameworks.  Also, I do not think that any of these frameworks fully defines every step that a company will need to take to implement a Scaled Agile Program (though SAFe does admit that not every aspect of implementation is covered – http://www.scaledagileframework.com/implementing/).  Finally SAFe is still relatively new, though the concepts underlying it have been around for a while.

However, from what I have experienced along with my discussions with other Agile practitioners, it is my opinion that Enterprises are better off to start with a framework for scaling Agile (whether SAFe or another framework), than to go it alone and make up their own.  The key is to make sure that the Enterprise Agile Scaling framework you choose is implementable in your particular business context and matches up with the way that you do business (more on this in future posts).

All the best, from Singapore,

John.

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Posted in Agile, Agile Adoption, agile enterprise, Agile Framework, agile methodology, Agile Scaling, Disciplined Agile Delivery, kanban, Large Scale Scrum (LESS), SAFe, Scrum, Scrum of Scrums, XP

The Director that loved to shuffle his Agile Team

Posted on June 9, 2014 by jokoro12 — Leave a comment

At a multi-national entertainment company that had adopted Agile at a large scale ($1 billion USD program, with ~500 developers plus shared services teams) I worked with the Director of a group that was adopting Agile.  The Director was a huge proponent of Agile which really helped with adoption within the team.  Our team actually used a Kanban variant (actually “Scrumban” aligned with the cadence of the other team’s on the project which used Scrum – why we chose a Kanban variant is a story for another time) to deliver.  From an Agile practices perspective the team and the organisation overall were becoming quite mature.

However, this is not an Agile process story, but rather a story about Agile leadership and people.  You see even though this Director (we will call him Ed) was a great supporter of Agile within his team and his group he had one leadership habit that often sabotaged our efforts.  Ed loved to switch his team members from project to project.  He would spend the day “wheeling and dealing” with the other managers, Directors, and VPs at the company about who would work on what project.  I think this was one of his greatest joys.

In one example of how this affected the team, Ed  came merrily into the office one morning as our team was headed toward an important delivery milestone.  Different aspects of the included stories had been in-progress for some time in the continuous flow and we were nearing completion.  Ed then decided that day that he would move a key team member (we will call her Mary) who had been dedicated to this particular project.  Mary came to let me know that she was being moved to another project, which I immediately checked with Ed.  He confirmed that he had other “Important Work” that he needed Mary to do, and someone else would need to to backfill for Mary.

Now Ed and I were both aware that using an Agile approach whether Scrum, Kanban, or “Scrumban” it is not desirable to move team members frequently, and especially not mid-sprint / mid-strory.  The features based on the stories that Mary had been working on languished, as no one had the background that she did to ensure completion.  Mary also seemed very demoralised at being removed from the project and team at such a key point just before we could finally deliver.

Subsequently about one to two months later Mary left the company to pursue another opportunity.  While she never told me if this was in part due to being moved from project to project like a “cog-in-the-system”, I suspect that this was a large part of her decision to leave.  Mary had shared with the team that she had been on the fence about leaving for some time.  It is likely that the demoralising move and not being treated as a person, but rather a “resource” to be shuffled on a whim contributed to her decision.  The Agile moral of the the story is that in Agile leaders need to have the respect for team members and teams to let them complete their work, and to treat team members as people instead of replaceable “resources”.

Signing off from Singapore.

John.

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Posted in Agile, Agile Manager, Business Agility, Leadership, Scrum

The Worst Agile Boss I Ever Worked For

Posted on June 9, 2014 by jokoro12 — Leave a comment

So as we continue to look at Agile Leadership and what makes a great Agile leader, I would like to talk about the worst Agile boss I ever worked for.  Several years ago I worked for a company in a group that was responsible for custom software development and custom interfaces.  Two of the original leaders of the group had left, one to another division in the company and another to start a new venture.  The manager that remained (we will call him Bob) was very power hungry and led the team by fear.

Now the VP in charge of our group indicated that he would like for the teams in our group use an Agile approach for software development.  This Agile approach came in the form of adoption of an Agile tool, and doing daily stand-up meetings with the teams.  So Bob decided to start doing daily stand-ups with our team.  Bob would have us sit down in a meeting room first thing in the morning (~8am) and interrogate us about what work we had done.  If he was not satisfied with the answer he would prod and question and demand the answer he wanted about the work.  I imagine Bob would have considered himself to be the ScrumMaster.  However, this was far from the servant leadership / coach role that a ScumMaster is supposed to play.

I remember in one particular “Stand-up” with Bob, he interrogated and questioned one of my team mates to the point that he was in tears.  I can honestly say that in all my working career this was the only time (and still is) that I have seen a grown man break down in tears in a meeting at the office.  Bob seemed to get great satisfaction in intimidating team members and having unquestioning adherence to his program.  Unfortunately nothing about Bob’s approach was Agile.  An Agile leader serves their team, not intimidating them and leading by fear.  An Agile leader empowers their team, and helps them to do their best work, and to self-organise.  Bob did none of these things.

An Agile leader provides vision that the team can work towards and be inspired by.  Bob provided no vision, and in one meeting when asked what the vision was for the team, his only answer was awkward silence.  Bob was actually threatened by his team members doing well, and wanted to make sure no one rose above him, so he used fear and intimidation.  An Agile leader looks to bring out the best in their team, and by doing so brings out the best in themselves.  Indeed Bob was an objet lesson in how NOT to be an Agile Leader, whether ScrumMaster, Product Owner, Agile Manager, or executive!

If there is any key lesson here for me it would be:  As an Agile leader don’t be like BOB!  In fact when I think back on my time working on Bob’s team it helps me to be very clear what I NEVER want to do to my team or others as a leader!

Until next time, Stay Agile!

John.

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