In the Agile world, the one-eyed is leading the blind
8 ways to give yourself the upper hand in Agile journeys
How difficult is it to be an effective Agile expert? I have been pondering about that for a while now.
Over the years, I have read and studied many Agile sources. I went to the early beginnings of Agile. I have taken deep dives to get to the core of it all. I have had many great minds around me to engage with. I feel I’m equipped to help many organizations be more effective in creating valuable products. Yet, it sometimes boggles my mind how basic my narrative can be to make a difference.
This made me think: how fast can you become an Agile expert? Honestly, I think shockingly fast. The main reason is that so many so-called Agile experts do it entirely wrong. They roll out Agile approaches as if they are delivery processes. Preferably as a scaling solution. And while doing so, they ignore the human factor and what really matters.
As long as these ill-informed “consultants” wreak havoc, there’s a lot of work to do for those who understand the true concepts of Agile. Even though they may feel they don’t know anything compared to the Agile experts they meet in the field, their value can be enormous. They are the one-eyed leading the blind.
Now you may ask, what I consider essential knowledge to make a difference. So without further ado, here are eight essential elements that make you stand out of a crowd.
1. Outcomes over output
For many Agile transformations, the goal is to deliver products faster. Scrum and/or SAFe are implemented to streamline the processes and ensure frequent and fast delivery of features.
However, faster production should never be a goal of an Agile way of working. The actual outcome must be part of the narrative. It should be clear how features are supposed to help achieve desired outcomes. Otherwise, the organization is clueless about what they are doing.
I always start my coaching by discussing outcomes vs output. It never fails to enlighten people and at the very least get everyone on the same page of why they wish to work in an Agile way.
2. The learning loop
Another often misunderstood element of Agile is learning from what you did. Retrospectives are generally well-established but often don’t consider addressing external topics that negatively influence the team. The reason is often that the team doesn’t know how to do this. When you can help the team to take this step, that is often a big win.
Even more pressing is how the feedback on their work often doesn’t include the impact on the desired outcome. Many teams don’t consider customer feedback or its impact on the organisational goals. This is heavily related to the first point, outcomes over output.
3. Verifying your assumptions
When your environment isn’t straightforward, any expectation of value you think you will create with your product needs to be verified afterwards. You can’t simply state you deliver an x amount of value by delivering these 5 features unless you ensure to check this.
Helping people to realize this has proven to be very effective for me. I have coached people from team level to C-level. Regardless of their position, many don’t have this realization while they are at the same time introducing Agile or working in Agile teams. More than 20 years after the birth of Agile, it is still a mystery to many.
4. The product experience
Some who are critical of Agile are pointing to the fact that it has created a new type of silos: autonomous teams working on their feature or component without having a clear view of the total picture. This is autonomy taken too far.
The user doesn’t care if the product feature you created works flawlessly. If other parts of the product experience are lacking, that is what they will care about. This goes beyond the core product, like hardware and software.
As an example: I am very happy with how my fitness watch tracks my activities and presents training suggestions. But the sleep tracker is terrible. By itself, I could ignore that. I know best if I slept well or not. But when the training suggestions or my overall training progress are being influenced by the sleep score, I am less happy.
Everything on a product matters to your user. This is how you should look at creating value for your customers. It is a widely missed topic and an excellent improvement opportunity for any Agile coach.
5. Collaboration
Related to the product experience is the need for collaboration. While Agile approaches talk about self-organizing and cross-functional teams, there’s a limit to how many people can effectively work in a team. Multiple teams are often unavoidable.
To ensure the overall outcome of the product experience is great, teams need to find ways to collaborate on their mutual goals. The simple notion that this is important is a novel idea for many. So it is another quick win for people coaching these people.
6. Learning Culture
Many organizations are failure-averse. They see not meeting the expectations as a failure and this should be avoided as much as possible. This leads to teams avoiding any risks, clinging to creating output based on detailed planning. And not looking at the actual outcomes.
The most important job in any Agile journey is to embrace a learning culture. People should understand that every assessment of expected value is an estimate that needs to be verified. This in turn means that you will also find unexpected results. These could even be negative. Users may be dissatisfied with a new functionality.
The crux of the negative feedback is that you learn from this to have a better understanding of what will work instead. This is the whole premise of working in an Agile way.
When you are able to spot this and coach the people to help them realize the importance of a learning culture, you are one step ahead of many others. Especially those who only focus on implementing delivery frameworks.
7. Facilitation
Great coaches know how to unleash the potential of people and organizations. This requires facilitation skills. Facilitators help people to work better together. They help to create common goals, plan their work, have discussions, and seek consensus, to name a few things.
As a coach, it is important to be a good facilitator to help the organization realize its potential.
8. Coaching
To be effective as a coach, you need to be able to actively listen, helping people to shape their ideas and gain new insights. It is helping people to put one and one together and helping them to understand their true needs.
These true needs are sure to not be not the rollout of a framework, but solving problems or creating higher value products! When you are good at helping people realise this, you are of great value to them.
End note
When you see my eight essential elements to be effective as an Agile coach, you may think these are quite basic. The first six which are specifically about important elements of working in an Agile way are indeed very straightforward. But I can assure you that my conversations, training and coaching are 95% about this. And this is regardless of the position of the people within the organization.
Many companies still are set up as organizations were 100 years ago when times were more simple and the product world was much more predictable. But times have changed. And with that comes a shift in the company culture. I feel we are still at the very beginning of this particular shift. And this is good news for all of you who have come to this realization. Because many organizations need you. Whether they know it or not.
But what do you think? Let me know in the comments!
Companies more often than not implement "agile processes", while in fact Agile requires a learning mindset (#7). It's always tough to explain the concept of Agile to people who are used to a non-agile mindset.
9. System Thinking or "looking and optimizing the whole" instead of "my part". I learned this more than 25 years ago at university and it is still neither common knowledge nor practice.