This post is aimed at the leader that is thinking about one or all of these things:
- Starting an agile transformation
- Hiring agile coaches or scrum masters to boost your teams’ performance
- Trying to reduce the operating budget while bringing a product to market faster
There are a ton of resources, advertisements, and agencies that all revolve around agile coaching, especially targeted at enterprise-sized companies. If you’re in a leadership position in a company that deals with technology (hint: yes, that’s your organization) you’ve at least been pitched to about the merits of Agile Development.
Unfortunately, in the last several years we’ve seen an intense wave of what is now called the “Agile Industrial Complex”. That’s all the certifications (CSM, CPO, SA), frameworks (SAFe, Scrum, Kanban, etc), agencies (“agile consulting practice” is a common name), conferences, and the list goes on. For all of us that are in this industry, let’s be honest and take our lumps on this one: a lot of this isn’t actually helping organizations’ agility. In many cases, it’s hurting it.
I’ve seen and been part of more than one transformation where the following was all happening at once:
- Leaders didn’t state the problem they were trying to solve because it was “business” and not for IT members to worry about
- An agile practice’s sales team acting as representatives between the business and the coaches.
It took months just for the coaches to figure out what the real problem was that they were trying to solve. At bill rates in the hundreds of dollars per hour. Paying a bench of coaches thousands of dollars per week to work on the wrong problem is a waste of your organization’s money.
Before you start talking to agencies or coaches, ask yourself this one question:
What is the business problem that we need to solve?
The answer to this question should keep you and your leadership peers up at night.
If you’re wondering what kinds of problem statements work well with agile practices versus ones that don’t, here are some good examples:
- “We’re losing market share because customers are frustrated with our product.”
- “We’re not innovating enough.”
- “There’s an emerging market we want to capitalize on, but we might not beat our competition to market.”
- “We need to add a widget to our product to please our customers, but it’s really hard and we don’t know how to do it.”
And examples of what to avoid:
- “Development teams are not fast enough.”
- “We need to reduce operating expenses (opex).”
- “We need to say we use Agile development to attract better talent.”
Either way, your problem statement is still valid
If you are relating to one of my “Not great examples”, this doesn’t mean your problem is invalid. These are also real problems that are challenging. But agile isn’t the right tool for unilaterally fixing these problems. If you need to reduce your operating expenditure, reduce it. Starting by identifying waste in your processes is a good start. If you use traditional methods, like staff reduction, you’re probably going to lose development speed – but a bad agile transformation being done for the wrong reason is going to dramatically increase your spending and will definitely reduce your development speed.
How can I tell if agile coaching is right for my organization?
Here’s a quick litmus test on whether the problem you are trying to solve can be solved by adopting agile practices: Your problem statement is an organization-wide statement. Not an IT-department-only statement.
This leads me to quote another expert on agile that I agree with on this matter: Allen Hollub.
“Teams aren’t agile. Organizations are agile. “
Allen Holub – “How Agile Work Actually Works with Allen Holub”, Programming Leadership, https://youtu.be/nhkj52oYGyM
If you are about to start an agile transformation that is only for your IT or development department, if the impression is that agile is “just something developers do”, stop now. You don’t actually want to take on an agile transformation. Take your hundreds of thousands of dollars in the budget for coaches and do something else with it. You could literally buy a yacht for yourself and do less harm to your organization.
If the problem you are trying to solve with agile targets a single department, please consider why you have that problem. There is a larger organizational problem causing it. There is no framework, conference, agile certification course, or coach that is an “easy button” for fixing organizational issues. They also can not substitute for the combination of experience and context that your team members possess in regard to your specific industry and problem space.
Agile isn’t for me. Now what?
Ok so now what? What if you need help, and want someone to help you that can get you going in the right direction? At this point, we’re talking about executive coaching and we’re leaving the agile transformation space. And that’s ok.
Now we’re no longer talking about agile coaching or an agile transformation. There are a lot of executive coaches that specialize in helping leaders set the right expectations and learn how to focus effort on the right problems.
I still want to talk to an agile coach
I’m prepping another blog post that will help navigate how to navigate the Agile Industrial Complex. Here’s a quick tip that cuts through the noise:
Most smaller shops and independent coaches, including myself, will give you a free one on one consultation that lets you discuss your specific situation, and determine the best path forward. Just remember to be honest with the problem you are trying to solve.
It’s okay if you aren’t ready for or don’t want an agile transformation.
If you’ve read this far, thank you for reading! I’ve seen millions and millions of dollars spent on agile transformation after agile transformation that actually made things worse. I don’t want that to happen to you.