And the number #1 Characteristic of an Agile Organization is…
“The Commitment to be Great”
The ability to make the commitment to be more than just good comes from the ability to drive a culture of discipline that balances the metrics of profitability and reputation. Hopefully you have seen and heard that message come through in the other items in our top 10 list; I applied these concepts from Jim Collins’ in “Good to Great.”
“Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness is largely a matter of conscious choice and discipline.”
In the world of software development, an agile organization does not settle for having agile stuck in ghettos. An agile organization makes the commitment to go up the learning curve and blow past amateurism. As Jim describes this takes an organization that can increase the discipline to support increasing levels and scale of agility. Discipline to:
Regularly plan at the five levels (daily, iteration, release, roadmap and long-term vision)
Regularly make and meet the commitments you make based on a sustainable pace
Regularly inspect the progress & metrics and adapt the plans at each level
Make decisions based on the data, culture, and purpose
As Alan talks about at Amazon, it was just the OK from management that was needed. As Israel talks about at BMC, it was a Social Contract. You know what kind of commitment you need at your organization to scale agile. You need to get it to really improve and make your transition happen. Please, don’t settle for a weak commitment. It leads to isolated adoption, ghettos, and a slow, muddling adoption process. Scaling agility beyond just the development teams can be simple and rewarding, as long as you start with the commitment.
Here is a quick refresher of the complete Top 10 list:
At Rally, one of our core values is “Create your own reality.” In this 3 minute video, I talk about how successful Agile organizations embrace a practice of holding a corporate vision and yet encouraging people to find where they can best bring their talents to bear. In a traditional organization, a corporate vision may be the source of very strict, very detailed role descriptions and role assignments. The corporate vision in an Agile organization acts as a guide for how to help people contribute their best work for the overall corporate goals.
Watch my video for more about why I truly believe in both “Create your own reality” and Corporate Vision as key success factors in Agile organizations.
Ryan and I have been talking about quality and faster as necessary components of an Agile organization for awhile. A non-Agile view of a successful organization would have us believe that pushing more and more features into a release and to the market necessitates a loss, or at least reduction or great variance, in quality. In an Agile organization, the thinking is quite the opposite.
Curiously, when we speak of quality and faster inside Rally or with clients, we talk about each being indispensable to the other.
For a traditional, non-Agile case study, let’s look at the RCA case study Ralph Aguayo brings up in his book “Dr. Deming: The American Who Taught the Japanese About Quality.” At its height, RCA’s business model focused on getting as many televisions into the hands of consumers as possible. (Did your family have an RCA T.V. when you were growing up? Mine did!) Quality was secondary to the savings RCA could make from cheap components and speed of product to market. Cheap and fast meant greater profits. Well, as it turned out, no…
Nipper on RCA's first color tv set - the CT 100
Unfortunately for RCA, their model began to crumble when television sets started being returned due to defects, lots of them all still in the warranty period. The cost of attending to these faulty sets ended up being as much as 25% more than the cost of manufacturing the existing set.
Do you have a similar situation in your software product delivery? Are you trying to get profits by pushing features out with “defective parts” because they are “cheaper”?
And to throw another wrench into the works, are you taking so long to get these feature sets pushed out that you have too much of a delay in your feedback to find either the defects or the value of the features you pushed? In other words, is your emphasis on speed, at the expense of quality, coupled with very large feature-rich releases, exactly the wrong way to create greater value and fewer defects?
In an Agile organization, the entire organization concentrates on value delivery and quick feedback on that value.
That is, “are we delivering the right features to the market?” In turn, a real Agile organization understands, “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” and they do increase throughput without the traditional expense of decreasing quality. Defects held in check through a “stop the line” mentality free-up the organization to always respond to value feedback information faster. Think about RCA. If your scarce resources are tied up in managing defects and “returns,” they can’t be working on new feature sets. Or the feature sets delivered are being pushed on defects not yet resolved.
And so, the notion of “quality and faster” is not so counterintuitive as we may have once thought.
We need faster and faster feedback loops in time-to-market in order to continuously improve our ability to deliver quality (defect-free and valuable) features back to the market. Symmetrically, we need higher and higher quality features that are not defect-ridden or dubious in value in order to respond ever faster and more innovatively to the market.
With regard to the video reference to Jim Collins, you can read the interview about his new book and his personal rhythm on the NYTimes site. Verne Harnish’s Gazelles.com teaches the Rockefeller Habits on business rhythm.
In this 4 minute video, I talk about how successful Agile organizations embrace a notion of the ‘knowledge-creating company.’ In Agile, knowledge-creation can use “5 Levels of Planning” to ensure they are engaging in this whole organization practice. In sum, the highest level of planning, the vision, feeds and is fed by all subsequent levels, down to the lowest level of planning, the detailed daily work.
Watch my video for more about why I truly believe in both Bottom-up and Top-down decision making as a key success factor.
I love talking about Agile Organizations with Ryan Martens. When we thought about our Top 10 characteristics of an Agile organization, we recognized the pivotal importance of collaboration. (Having written a book entitled Collaboration Explained may have prejudiced me slightly :- )
When I talk with teams, organizations, and CxOs about adopting a collaborative culture, I can be met with some resistance. Some of it is very direct; often it is passive-aggressive. The rub lies in deep assumptions and old wounds:
Collaboration means dumbed-down
Collaboration means group-think
Collaboration means bringing decision-making to a halt
When Ryan and I say “collaboration” this is the opposite of what we mean. We have a very different picture in mind. Here is a quick view of what WE believe:
Not only can collaborative and smart go together —
they must!
Command-and-control actually makes people stupider—we hire smart people. Don’t we want them to stay as smart and actually get smarter? Command-and-control has the effect of lowering people’s IQ. Collaborative environments improve people’s cognitive skills. They raise people’s IQ’s. Which statement would you like to go home and tell your family: “Hey! I lower people’s IQ’s as a living!” or, “Wow, I actually make people smarter!”
Whether you read “The Wisdom of Teams” or “The Wisdom of Crowds” the evidence is in: we make better decisions when we invite more insights. This aligns with the Lean principle about gathering as many insights as possible before making a decision. Think about set-based, concurrent design and concurrent engineering.
People who believe collaboration means group-think (or dumbing down of decisions) haven’t experienced the power of Storming. That means inviting open and safe conflict around decision-making in a high performance, high trust environment. A prejudice against collaboration is usually based on old wounds. Trust was low. Safety was low. People’s IQ’s had been lowered. In these contexts, an individual team member may only have one tool in their toolbox: a hammer of heroics. Taking that hammer away can look disempowering. In this context, collaboration has to prove that they have something to gain. That is, they are ADDING to their toolbox.
Finally, to make sure that collaboration isn’t a drag on an organization, we rely on extremely effective facilitation. (Collaboration Explained is a good guide!) We rely on effective processes to gather the insights, to seek conflict and dialogue, and to guide teams to take insights and turn them into consensus. This form of collaboration is NOT compromise or capitulation. It manages and then eliminates swirling down energy-draining ratholes. It ensures discussion around useful dialogue versus interesting debate. And, it prevents Loudest Voice Driven Decisions (LVDD) :- )
In this 3-minute video I explain that by (1) finding a sustainable pace and (2) delivering continuous innovation, organizations define a higher level purpose that goes beyond their economic bottom line.
In this 3-minute video, I share how organizations can achieve this balance through (1) stability, (2) sustainable pace, and (3) redefining success based on what the customer sees as most valuable, not just meeting the plan.
And why is this so important to a successful Agile organization?
Watch this 3-minute video for some of my ideas and 4 of the 10 characteristics of a Servant Leader from Robert Greenleaf. Or, see my full hour-long Servant Leadership webinar for a more in-depth look at this #9 characteristic of an Agile organization.
About the Author: Jean Tabakais a wine enthusiast, author and Agile Fellow at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by emailor RSS.
We learned last week that Rally has been recognized as one of the top 10 companies to work for in America by Outside Magazine (look for the complete list in their May issue and on Outside Online around May 1st), so we figured we’d start things off by covering one of our most prized characteristics, how to have work… and a life.
In this brief video, I share how organizations can effectively achieve work/life balance through a combination of (1) discipline, (2) rhythm and (3) alignment of corporate and personal culture.
How do you balance work and life to achieve success in both?
RallyDev.com
And the number #1 Characteristic of an Agile Organization is…
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