Brad Murphy, CEO of Gear Stream, gave a keynote presentation at last week’s Agile Success Tour. Brad’s vision includes helping organizations transition from project-driven governance to Lean, continuous flow, product line execution. We sat down with Brad to ask him 5 questions about Agile.
1. What’s the most valuable thing you’ve learned by helping organizations adopt Agile practices?
The dynamics surrounding the adoption of Agile practices are changing in ways that are very different from even two or three years ago. In parallel with implementing Agile practices and establishing effective Agile teams, we’re helping organizations connect Agile philosophies and values to vital stakeholder groups. We’ve recognized that actively involving all stakeholders early in the process is key to ensuring that core Agile teams are able to achieve expected results. Gaining the support of all collaborators in the organization dramatically helps core Agile teams successfully transform and deliver outcomes. Involving the following stakeholders is vital, including:
The core Agile team
Tooling, Infrastructure and Release Management – the architecture side of the equation.
Governance and PMO groups – more than half the time, this group builds the roles of the project managers, Agile teams and the Scrum Master. They consider how Agile teams work off backlogs. There’s huge potential for misalignment here.
Product Management – since this is frequently a group that doesn’t exist, the responsibilities here aren’t well defined. Loosely, I’ll describe this as a group of individuals responsible for defining business value. This group has to be aligned with the way Agile works.
Executive Management – all of the focus on Agile change with the groups listed above must be explicitly aligned with the strategy and values articulated by senior executives. Too often, Agile is pursued based on “generic” benefits like speed, responsiveness, quality… while these are “good,” they’re not explicit enough. We must challenge executives to express exactly how they will measure/recognize their own corporate goals and then map these back to the things we choose to emphasize in an Agile transformation.
2. What do you see as the #1 reason for adopting Agile?
Responsiveness would be #1. Having the ability to course-correct and change directions quickly in light of new mandates and directions. A close #2 is innovation. A distant #3 is productivity.
3. What are the biggest benefits of adopting Agile?
Gear Stream’s clients are realizing compelling organizational realignment by refocusing the entire value chain on external customers, as opposed to the often dysfunctional inward focus of many organizations. By aligning the entire value chain on external customers, our clients are able to more predictably influence customer satisfaction and marketshare objectives.
4. What one piece of advice would you give to new Agile teams?
I’ll give the advice I’m most passionate about. Agile teams need to challenge the rest of the organization to rethink and reconsider how work happens up and down-stream to them in order to fully exploit what they’re capable of achieving. It’s really about how Agile teams can actively promote, influence and change an organization beyond just what they do as a team. They really can – and do – influence and engage the rest of the organization. The failure pattern of Agile is almost always the same: we’ve built an Agile team, but failed to build the adjacent stakeholder teams in the process – then, the Agile team gets frustrated and the organization loses momentum and enthusiasm for Agile. Agile teams must have the ability to influence stakeholder teams, and ultimately, the baseline infrastructure of the entire organization.
5. How do you define Agile success? (Can you do it in 113 characters?)
Building, delivering & sustaining outcomes that customers r continually thrilled by, driving profit & value 4 all
While the answer MAY be “Yes!”, I posited that there may be a way to save our PMOs from going the way of the now extinct dodo bird.
8 Ways To Re-Tool a PMO in an Agile Environment
Have the PMO involved in helping rollout Agile on several pilot projects
This experience forms the roots for how the Agile PMO will engage throughout the organization with other project teams.
Besides ensuring that Agile training occurs, the Agile PMO can become the coaches of coaches, training the ScrumMasters of each team. They can also be the Agile voice into the business to ensure the Product representatives are fully bought into their role in Agile.
Learn from Lean: start a Kaizen and Gemba mentality now
The PMO should be the shepherds of continuous improvement so that the Agile adoption is not only sustained; it is vibrantly organic, every improving. This means moving beyond team-level iteration-focused retrospectives.
Kaizen events create cross-team learning. This learning exposes team practices that can be useful at an organizational level. In such cases, the team practices are elevated to the organizational “Standard of Work” (see later item). Moreover, the Kaizen event clarifies when a practice does not serve the entire organization and can remain a team practice, supported by team agreements and adhered to by the team.
In addition, in between Kaizen events, apply “Gemba”. An Agile PMO learns about the organization and spreads knowledge through the organization by being involved in projects. That means going to see, or “Gemba” according to Lean practices.
Being engaged with teams rather than dictating from afar may be a dramatic shift in PMO behavior. And, it is pivotal to teams’ respecting the role of the PMO in creating a successful Agile adoption.
Change your definition of “Standard of Work”
This is not a set of standards defined by and enforced by the PMO for project conformance.
In Agile, as guided by Lean practices, a standard of work is a statement of what is currently useful, how things are currently done. It provides a team a backdrop from which to perform continuous improvement through Kaizen events such as retrospectives.
The Agile PMO, rather than controlling and patrolling, engages in facilitating teams in continuous learning. This PMO encourages empowered teams and amplifies the learning that arises when such teams are truly empowered.
A great way to provide this facilitation and to engender cross-team involvement is to help organize and facilitate program-level and multi-program release planning meetings and product councils. The Agile PMO formulates a rhythm and a continuously improving agenda to help these meetings deliver the greatest benefit across teams.
Along with being facilitative, Agile PMOs act as Servant Leaders. They serve their organizations by finding out what they need and getting it for them.
They lead by serving. They remove impediments. They measure what is a problem for teams so that they can serve teams be removing the problem. They don’t look for status from teams; they look for how they can serve teams.
So, for an Agile PMO, leading the Agile rollout means finding out what teams need and delivering that. It is about creating collaborative plans, not collecting statuses. For more about Servant Leaders in Agile, check out the first section of my book Collaboration Explained.
Provide guidance on regulatory adherence
In organizations that must adhere to Sarbanes-Oxley, FDA, HIPAA, or other regulatory guidelines, the Agile PMO can represent these “red” (immutable) stories in each team’s Product Backlog.
The PMO governance work can be the guide to each Product Owner on how to deliver the documents or features that help the entire organization remain in compliance with these regulatory constraints. Governance is now a service to project teams versus being a control mechanism.
Seek guidance from Lean to use Flow, Pull, and Innovate as guidelines for organizational-level Agile adoption
Much of the guidance here has a hint of Lean about it. That is because PMOs work at an organizational level. Moving Agile beyond one or more pilot teams requires guidance for maturing and scaling.
I recommend applying a 5-step approach which is based on Full, Pull and Innovate principles from Lean Thinking.
Once Development group is working with the business to deliver prioritized, valued items, the Agile PMO can bring in other ‘back office” functions to help ensure a growing Agile adoption.
Finance, HR, infrastructure, the executive team, and others must eventually all accept the Agile approach for true organizational change and value.
The Agile PMO has an opportunity to be the mentors and guides for this growth and maturation.
Foster useful metrics
Let go of that Waterfall security blanket around what are useful project or program metrics.
Determine which metrics to track that directly help organizations concentrate on value delivery.
Whatever does not deliver value is waste. It may be temporarily necessary waste. Or it may be a pernicious, embedded waste that has been assumed to be necessary.
An Agile PMO ferrets out these “false friend” metrics and works with teams to determine metrics around value: test coverage, team velocity, agile adoption assessment, defect counts, definition of done.
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