- 23 January 2021
- Posted by: Erkan Sarıkaya
- Category: AGILE
“What did the agile transformation give us? We went agile, so what happened?” The question comes to mind before long.
It depends on what you are after, but let me put it bluntly: “We can’t say for sure.”
In reality, we can never compare the outcome of any change with the way things were before and say with certainty “this is what caused it.”
That’s what culture is like… That’s what change is like…
That’s why you won’t find a recipe in agile frameworks. It’s right there in the name: “framework”. There are no rules; there are values, there are principles, there are good practices, there is a team agreement, and all of them exist to keep you on track on your “agility journey” and to get you to the goal together.
However much we want a recipe, however hard we look for a magic wand to solve our problems, these things simply don’t happen without setting out, getting tired, being patient and stumbling along the way. It’s going to be hard.
“Be agile, now!” :). (Agile is not a silver bullet.)
These consultants and psychologists are all the same – always giving vague answers 🙂
- “It depends on the situation”
- “We need to ask the team”
- “And how did that make you feel?” 🙂
- “There is no deadline, we can’t say”
- “The PO prioritizes, the Scrum Master sorts it out, where is the manager?…”
True, there is uncertainty over time and complexity rules, but reality is not far away. Tick, tock, tick tock… time keeps flowing.
Get closer to it! That is, act now and live it! Try, fail, learn, improve, repeat… There, you have moved closer to the “Agile Mindset”.
Think Big, Start Small, Move Fast
What was the last of our 10 golden tips for the agile transformation journey, our motto? “Think Big/Agile, Start Small, Move Fast“
There is the “Past”, the “Now” and the “Future”. Let’s start from “Now”, set a goal as far into the future as we can reach, and stretch toward it. Just as far as we can reach.
When was the last time you stretched your arms above your head? It may sound simple, but in modern life we can go days without raising our arms above our ears. Our ancestors would frequently raise their hands above their heads to pick things from trees. (Stretch Goal)
Rajio taisou is the 5-minute warm-up routine that 30% of Japanese people do every morning. It is also what everyone in their 80s and 90s interviewed in Ogimi, Japan’s village of long-lived people, has in common.
From the book IKIGAI
Could the fact that the fruit on the trees hangs above our heads be a message too? Grow, reach up… there must be another way…
One morning in San Francisco, on my way to the Oracle Open World conference, I was amazed and full of admiration when I saw Japanese people in suits doing this kind of exercise between the office towers before entering the building. I have always had a dream of doing these exercises between the office towers in Turkey too 🙂
To dream big, grow our business and keep producing longer-lasting, valuable outputs (increments), we need to be ready to take an X-ray of “now”.
… now we know our capacity. (Internal Metrics – Current State (AS-IS))
Once you have planted the pointed leg of the compass, open the other leg as wide as it will go. Reach as far as you can.
Isn’t there a concrete, real example?
Agile Metrics: A Scorecard Example
After all these metaphors, here is an example of an Agile Metrics Scorecard from a software development organization. According to this model:
How great would it be if an agile team could say things like these:
- Our work estimation accuracy is 53%.
- One unit of work takes 15 days on average to complete once started. (Cycle Time)
- One unit of work takes 44 days on average to complete from the customer’s point of view. (Lead Time)
- We have 4 Sprints/Iterations, or 2 months, of work waiting.
- A customer request waits in our queue for 29 days on average. (Waiting in the Backlog)
- On average, we deliver 1.4 items of business value to our customer every day. (per person) (Continuous Release-CI-CD)
- On average, we run 4 test cases every day. (per person) (Quality)
- Relative to production, our average monthly complaint rate is 16% (Problem Density)
- Relative to production, our average incident rate is 80% (Incident Density)
When Metrics Speak: A Dialogue
The project manager approaches the PO, closer and closer, and here they come…
- – When will this work be done? Who is going to do it?
- – We can’t say for sure, honestly; someone on the team pulls it using the PULL system, maybe it gets split, we estimate it in SP, there is no telling how long it will take. Who takes it on will also become clear after Sprint Planning. And it may change along the way. So it’s not clear-cut.
- – Whaaaat?!?
What if instead the PO looked at past data (Priority, Affinity Estimating data, Velocity, etc.) and said:
- – Based on the team’s data, if we start right away, there is a 90% chance it can go live in x days, and an 80% chance it will be in users’ hands in y days.
- – And given its current urgency, we can probably start 2 Sprints from now.
What do you tell the people who ask you? 🙂
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Author: Erkan Sarıkaya — Enterprise Agile Coach, founder of GONEX. He writes on enterprise agile transformation, Scrum and agile leadership coaching. You can learn more on the About Us page and read his other posts.