Where Is Your Organization In Its Agility Journey?

Organizations that try to use “Agile” methods tend to go through a series of phases. At first they think that they merely have to bring in Agile coaches and “start doing Agile”.

That tends to yield a few successes and slight overall improvement, but not the large improvement that was expected, which causes reflection, and during this time the organization is vulnerable to consulting companies that offer canned approaches that involve frameworks.

The claim is that with the more complex framework, agility can be achieved. This leads to a second attempt, in which the organization tries to “reset” their approach and roll out a complex “Agile framework”.

In the second attempt, the organization usually tries to include “DevOps”. They approach this the way that they are approaching the rollout of the framework: they hire DevOps engineers, create a “DevOps team”, and create a plan to establish “DevOps processes”.

The result is that a lot of money is spent, and there is a lot of activity, but in the end, results are mixed at best. In fact, the ROI of what was spent tends to be quite poor, and agility—the very thing that was the goal in the first place—has not increased significantly.

If there is a third attempt, it usually includes trying to find “unicorn” Agile+DevOps coaches who know all the various things, and a mandate to make Agile “mainstream” and thereby claim success through mandate.

Yet the reason for the difficulty is that agility was not understood in the first place. Agility does not result from establishing processes: it results from several ingredients, including having a generative culture that promotes positive styles of leadership, and having knowledge and experience of flow patterns for solving problems. Read more here.