State of Agile using maps

Hi,

My name is Philippe - I work in the UK as a change agent for agility in enterprises. I have drafted the attached WhitePaper about the state of Agile.

Whitepaper available here

It shows that:

• The state of agile transformations is dragged into a commodity by the training/certification economy
• It is failing the change it finishes to drive because the change is to happen in the Custom level and therefore requires different approaches
• This is the result of a wrong focus on the practitioners rather than on the end users / businesses needing change
• A chasm is growing and we should wonder when this bubble might burst. The cycle of new order items gets swallowed back into the codification / commoditisation whirlpool
• It is all building up to something new around “Being agile” (as opposed to doing Agile) and how this is connected to Digital Leadership

I am working in this field and I am aiming to drive the next generation of professional services, which I call Coachulting

• Though the people see the need for change, it is a difficult sell to the traditional management who “want the problem solved by consultants” without having to get their hands dirty
• In this process many managers may find themselves obsolete and redundant (despite driving “doing Agile”).
• For how long will the current situation last before a new order item disrupts the current nonsense?

Maps helped to crystallise the problem. Change should be happening between emergence of new ideas and Custom implementation in organisation, because the model of delivery is enabling innovation, quality, keeping costs in check, etc in a digital world.
However Agile is focusing on lucrative certification revenues and driving Product/Commodity into the market. Maps make it obvious that there is a Chasm.

Feedback welcome before sharing on the mainstream forums.

Best regards,
Philippe

An agility model will require a finance/billing/budgeting function to control cloud service and code execution environment costs.

I imagine this will span across roles and responsibilities and include billing prediction, procurement, operational cost escalation mitigation, and even cost of curiosity.

Open source tools will probably emerge that can automate some of these processes and decisions during design, development and deployment. A marketplace of providers/resellers offering cheaper code execution environments (serverless) may emerge - similar to Amazon EC2 spot instances but with more finely grained price points and a wide range of SLAs. These providers will only be suitable for certain workloads and therefore require (agile) risk assessments too.

There are already cloud tools to analyse the bills and figure where the usage may not be that optimised.
The difficulty with those tools is to determine compared to what?

• Looking at idle instances or over-processing vs usage (but if you have a monolith that will always be the case)
• Unused environment over night? (why not descaling your test enviornment)
• Data duplication
• Reprocessing of large calculations because of whatever challenge
• Unleashed worthwhile capacity on new value creation
• Cost optimisation over the wasteful underutilisation of current physical servers

All the above can only be truly managed decently using a disciplined Kaizen approach / Culture. Most enterprises have been very bad at that.

It is really difficult to figure the baseline to compare. Many corporates will move a big batch of monoliths as lift and shift because of a corporate mandate and running out of a lease in their data centre.
Dumping entire monoliths and associated data into the Cloud (basically using Cloud as a Virtual server) is going to be very expensive. Cloud is cheaper if you take advantage of the elasticity but some will be in for a bad surprise once they lift and shift.

p

Hello Philippe,

I am seeing the limitation of Agile approaches within organization and how tough it is to go beyond the benefits of initial adoption.

A ‘continuous’ kaizan (coupled with occasional kaikaku) approach is needed - and for that it is the organization’s leadership ought involved - and be the ones driving it.

The "Agile Certification Industrial Complex’ also does not help.

I am interested in seeing where your maps and your hypothesis leads to next.

With Best Regards

Shyam Kumar
Agile Coach
Boston, MA, USA

Glad you are mentioning this as others have done.

Kaizen is not just a process, it is a culture. As such you cannot associate or interchange it with Kaikaku or Kakushin. Bigger change needs investment, coordination, etc. This involves many layers where the man/woman on the ground are not so consulted. Kaizen aims to find continuous changes that don’t need that, and are therefore within the reach of anybody in the company. It also reveals the challenges of driving the simplest changes and escalates through the company as a way of resolving systemic constraints.

Adding up the little changes of course ends up with bigger change, but it is especially resulting in a culture of driving and accepting change. So resistance is not such a problem.
The continuous improvements culture also drives an effort of evolution and quality (naturally). So you don’t need to end up with legacy through building up of tech debt. So you need less of the big projects that refresh the legacy that builds over time.

Kaizen is typically very much turned to problem solving, and in IT / Agile we are also looking for innovation. It is therefore important to establish how the Kaizen values can be applied to innovation. This is where Complexity thinking, SenseMaking, experimentation, feedback mechanisms, etc. You pivot from 5 whys to Obstacles-to-Outcomes.

I am currently working with teams working with Systemic Management / Coaching. Putting the team through its pace to let emerge the thinking from them, whilst guiding the exercises to enable this. I am working with many tools and workshops adapted to the conditions of the teams.

There is no magic mushroom method because it is about skills to develop the culture. Not knowledge to implement a method.

I am looking to work with a pair of Business Stakeholder / IT Stakeholder over Zoom (so anywhere in the world). I would consider discounts for this under some conditions.

I have taken some of the comments onboard and have now produced what is likely to be the final version.

Please download the WhitePaper from here

Some may think that my opinion is biased because I am positioning what I do on the emerging side. For those, I would say that the reason I do what I do, is precisely because I am following my own map!

Aren’t you just perpetuating the very thing you criticise about Agile practices? You’ll end up certifying “coachultants”.

The Certification Economy isn’t the problem, it’s the snake oil sales people who make Agile practices so complicated that an organisation needs certified “consultants” to guide them through the swamp. This is an oblique reference to the “big ball of mud” antipattern.

Any transformation is simple, as long as the seniors let go of their “everyone but me” mentality. Mostly they don’t, so they don’t lead the transformation. No leadership then no transformation.

I don’t like Simon’s phrase “tyranny of agile”, tarring all of Agile practices with the one-size-fits-all accusation. If you are a SAFe sales person what are you selling? You won’t tell the customer to go look at Scrum@Scale. It’s the nature of sales people to sell what they have.

So, please, when you do mapping, realise that there are perfectly good and simple Agile practices that are freely available.

At the chaos end is Scrum, or Scrumban, or Kanban. That’s for pioneers.

For the settlers there’s Lean. A great practice for middle management, if there are any that dare to stay in a transforming organisation.

For the town planners there is Tom Gilb’s Value First technique. Yes, Tom Gilb. Sometimes called the grandfather of Agile. Although now it’s mostly his son, Kai, who presents.

Take your pick they all are freely available to use, take a few minutes to learn and years to understand the subtleties of practice.

There are thousands of us, possibly millions, around the world that feel there is a better way. There is, and it’s not to try to pretend there is always an 'ology to solve the problem.

You don’t have to invent another one.

This is pretty much the point.

The leadership is not taking charge because they see this as traditional change. Bring the specialist to deliver change.

This should never have been about agile, lean or 6 sigma. Those are only methods and I can tell you that it is not that black and white but highly fractal.

With this in mind there needs to be a co-evolution of practice of the supporting ecosystem.
Consultants do things, they don’t transform people.
Training industry has gorged on the dollars of selling a lie.

This whole ecosystem has to clean up and drive change in People, Teams and Leadership to get Business to Work closer with Digital technology.

With all this said, agile is not bad, especially conceptually.
Scrum / SAFe are at operational levels only.
Not at strategic / organisational level and this is a big problem, as many find out. They end up working differently (in sprints) at great effort and for no particular upside.

True agility comes from the reflection at enterprise level of bringing Biz and Tech closer together and this needs a co-evolution of processes, technology, people, teams, strategy, organisation and most importantly Leadership to drive the work AND the change. (True) coaches are only the scaffold helping them.

Chief Digital Officers, Agile change agents, Head of ways of working, are not a sign of progressive organisations but a sign of organisations where the business is not joined up with tech and probably will never be. Those will struggle in Digital economy.

Despite my criticism this is a great piece of work.

I showed your analysis of the state of agile to a couple of people at the agile business conference in london this week. They were interested, and one had done the LEF mapping course, so understood the diagrams.

It needs more air. Perhaps this may be the way to show complex and chaotic organisations that there is a technique they can learn to expose their strategic shortcomings?

Thank you.
I was there too. Shame we missed each other.
By all means, please point people to me.
I am starting to get Clients into it. My angle is to lead with digital strategy and mapping as a means rather than an end in itself.

I am running a meetup on the 7th of Oct with the British Computer Society where we’ll map the state of Agile.
I am also running a one day training on 11th of October.

I also recently ran a workshop at my Digital Leadership meetup.

Notes and deck at
https://www.lead-digital.org/post/digital-strategies-live-mapping-workshop