Many organizations find they have hit a wall in their Agile transformation. Something is still missing: the culture has not changed, leaders do not yet fully understand their full Agile role, the structure is not aligned around value streams, teams find major obstacles to doing, and being, Agile. The causes of these dilemmas are not simple; if they were, you would have solved them by now.
Sometimes, organizations adopting an Agile approach are mostly following Scrum practices like rituals. They might do daily stand-up meetings but do not perceive that the real goal is to deliver quickly value to the customer. In an article, Vinod Santhanam explains how the Value-Oriented Incremental Delivery (Void) approach can help Agile teams to achieve this goal.
Learn how to promote self-organization in Scrum through systemic coaching and large-scale facilitation. Systemic coaching is a methodically guided self-reflection to consider systemic contexts of a concern from different perspectives.
The Project Management Institute (PMI), announced last week the acquisition of Disciplined Agile (DA), the company created by Mark Lines and Scott Amble that is backing the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) framework. DAD defines itself as “a people-first, learning-oriented hybrid agile approach to IT solution delivery”.
Following the famous mantra of “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”, Scrum teams have often a set of metrics to monitor their activity. Velocity, the amount of work performed by a team during a single sprint, might be one of the most famous Agile metric. Doc Norton has written an interesting book about the negative sides of velocity and what might be a good metric for an Agile team.
Agile development starts with small Scrum teams tackling small problems. After some initial successes the organization gets more ambitious, and tries to scale Agile, getting more teams tackling bigger problems. At some point these endeavors run headlong into finance and governance structures from a different era, designed with huge projects in mind, and it usually doesn’t end well.
For decades, product development has been focused mostly on the speed and efficiency of delivery. So now we are stuck in the quagmire of talking about the methods and activities of delivery rather than focusing on the actual goal – delivering high value to the customer.
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