Measure What Matters

So far we have looked at two of the four key elements for real business agility - distributed decision making and execution efficiency. It's time now to look at the third element - measuring what matters. Organisations tend to collect a lot of data They measure a lot of stuff. The problem with many of those measurements is that they are often data that is easy to collect rather than data that is important.

What's the problem with that? Data is data. If it's easy to measure, why not measure it? Having more data has to be better than less. Not necessarily. There is something important about making a measurement that makes it vitally important to measure the right things, rather than just measuring stuff just because you can. The important thing about making a measurement is that measuring drives behaviour. As soon as you measure something, people will naturally try to optimise that measurement and if you're measuring the wrong things, that can drive some very bad behaviour.

Organisational Change, AgilityDave Martin31 October 2018organisational change, patterns, measurement, metricsComment

Execution Efficiency

It's time to continue our look at the 4 key changes needed to become a truly agile organisation. This time we will look at the second key change - execution efficiency. Now most organisations will claim to be efficient already. They make very efficient use of their resources - everything is scheduled to achieve 100% resource loading at all times and costs are kept to a minimum. Things are produced with the minimum number of people and at the minimum cost. What could be more efficient that that?

From a pure, cost efficient sense, they are right, so I'm going to carefully define what I mean by efficiency here. It's not cost efficiency. What I'm talking about is how efficiently the organisation can turn ideas into value. How long does it take, and how much does it cost to take an idea and turn it into a real product or service that generates business value? Isn't that the same as resource efficiency? No, it isn't.

Agility, Organisational ChangeDave Martin17 October 2018organisational change, patterns, efficiency, flowComment

Distributed Decision Making

Imagine you are in a car travelling down the motorway. You are trying to keep to the speed limit (110km/h here in Australia). How good are you at doing that? Do you, like me (and most of the population) just follow the car in front with an occasional glance at the speedometer? A few hasty speed corrections when that occasional glance tells you that the car in front was doing 130 not 100? Now imagine that there is a police car right behind you. Does your strategy change? Mine certainly does. Your eyes barely leave the speedometer. You maintain absolute, tight control over the car's speed.

There are downsides to this approach though. While your eyes are firmly fixed on the speedo (that's Australian for speedometer BTW) they aren't firmly fixed on the road. While you are deeply focused on the operational details of driving the car (controlling its speed) you have lost sight of something very important - the road ahead. You may be sitting right on the speed limit but you have just driven past your exit. Or worse, you may have missed a sign telling you that the speed limit had changed and now the flashing lights are in your rear view mirror and you are being pulled over for speeding. Precisely the thing you were trying to avoid.

Organisational Change, AgilityDave Martin3 October 2018patterns, organisational change, decision making, decentralisingComment

Doing vs Being

Let me get this out of the way first - Agile is not the point. I see a lot of organisations wanting to "do agile". My question is always "Why?" Why do they want to do agile? Often I find that there is no why. They want to do agile because doing agile is what you do these days, or doing agile is what our competitors do. Doing agile is seen as some sort of magic formula for success. Do these things and good things will happen. No one is quite sure what good things they will be, people talk vaguely about efficiency and faster/better/cheaper. But that doesn't really matter, whatever happens, it will be good.

All these efforts will fail. The organisation will end up doing a bunch of agile things - standups, boards, retros and so on, but the end result will be - nothing. No change in any real measures of organisational success. No improvements in ROI, no improvements in time to market. Nothing. Why? Because doing agile is not the point. Agility is a way to deliver business outcomes. Business outcomes are the point. Not doing agile. The outcome organisations are really looking for is to become agile. Becoming agile means they can respond quickly to changing markets, deliver what their customers need before their competitors do and so on. Becoming agile as an organisation is not the same as doing agile practices. Yes, the practices are important but they aren't the full picture. If all you do are the practices, you will never become agile. As a mathematician would say, they are a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition.

Agility, Organisational ChangeDave Martin18 September 2018patterns, organisational changeComment

Last Responsible Moment

Probably the least understood (or most misunderstood) lean principle is "decide as late as possible". I have seen it used to justify all sorts of weird decision-making policies that generally involve never making decisions, because surely as late as possible means leaving it until the absolute last possible moment, or even later. I have seldom, if ever, seen it applied correctly. So let's take a look at this principle and see what it really means.

The other way to express this principle is "defer decisions until the last responsible moment". There are two points of confusion here. The first is what is the last responsible moment? The other is what exactly do we mean by deferring decisions? Let's look at the last responsible moment. What is the last responsible moment? Does it mean the absolute last minute? Do we leave all decisions until we are absolutely forced to make one because otherwise the whole endeavour will fall flat? No. That makes no sense at all. Leaving decisions until they are forced upon you is hardly being responsible. Does it mean making decisions early because that's the responsible thing to do? Again, no. Making decisions early isn't using the last responsible moment. The last responsible moment is a really hard thing to define, so let's not try. Let's re-word it instead. The intent of the last responsible moment is to make decisions with the maximum possible information.

Agility, Organisational ChangeDave Martin4 September 2018decision makingComment

Holiday Agility In The Workshop - Part 2

Last time we started looking at my holiday workshop experience and seeing how it related to agility and infrastructure agility in particular. We looked at why the two are similar (long lead times for materials, limited rollback options for mistakes and so on). We then started to step through the process of building something out of timber and discovered a few useful rules for infrastructure agility along the way. We looked at the planning and material buying stages and discovered the first two rules for infrastructure agility -

Have just enough information to get started. The detail will follow.
When buying materials, give yourself a little slack. A little upfront cost leads to a lot of downstream flexibility.

Today we are going to cover some more of the process and see if we can discover some more useful rules.

AgilityDave Martin21 February 2018infrastructureComment

Holiday Agility In The Workshop

Happy new year folks! Welcome back to the blog for another year. I hope you all had a great holiday break. I certainly did. I spent a large part of my break productively engaged in my workshop building things. I have mentioned this before but for those who have missed my previous workshop updates, I build things out of timber. Furniture, using traditional joinery so no nails, no screws, no fancy fasteners, just mechanical fit and glue to hold it all together. No cheap timber either. No pine. No MDF. No chipboard. Australian hardwoods all the way. To describe the process of working with expensive timber, let me put it into terms that more of my audience will understand (given that I suspect there are more software people than timber-workers who read this) - imagine working on a software project where every action you make is non-reversible. There is no source control, no revert, no undo, no control-z. Everything you do is straight to production. If you make a mistake you have to throw the whole part (and anything it is permanently glued to) away and start again with new materials, which involves a 3 hour round trip to the specialist timber yard, a lot of expense as you have buy a whole length not the little piece you need, and a long delay if they don't have what you want in stock.

So while I was building, I was thinking about just how anti-agile the whole process is. You need detailed up front plans. Once you start you really can't make changes, you are basically locked in. Materials are in limited supply, have long lead times and are expensive. There are limited options for any sort of teamwork. You can't have a team standing around a table saw. That's unsafe. In fact any more than two (one feeding, one catching and even then only if it's a big piece) and it's just not possible. You can't even have multiple people working on different pieces simultaneously (not in my workshop anyway) - there isn't the space and more than one machine at a time would start to blow fuses. So it really is a solo activity (until it gets to glue time where 7 or 8 extra pairs of hands are really handy for manipulating clamps). In a lot of ways it's a lot like infrastructure projects - expensive materials with long lead times. Detailed up front planning. Limited ability to roll back changes without massive rework. Lots of solo work doing configuration then brief bursts of activity at deploy time when it's all hands on deck. No wonder people say that infrastructure can't be done agile. But then I really looked at what I was doing and realised that most of those things describe the way I used to do woodworking a few years ago when I was starting out. What I was actually doing now, while it looked similar on the surface, was actually quite different. And quite agile.

AgilityDave Martin7 February 2018infrastructureComment

The Agile Transformation. Myth Or Reality?

We have all heard about organisations that have successfully made the transition to an agile way of working. Some of us may even know someone who knows someone who says they worked at one once. But much like sightings of the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot or the Tasmanian Tiger, most of these claims evaporate under even basic scrutiny. Now, I know there are agile organisations out there. Organisations that have been born in the agile age and have been built from the ground up with agile principles in mind. I'm not talking about those organisations.

I'm talking about the old, legacy organisations. The ones with decades of process and culture to remake. The ones we are always being told (mostly in press releases or flashy conference presentations) are transforming themselves into new, agile organisations. Shedding the baggage of the past and embracing the bright, agile future. But scratch the surface and how many have actually managed to transform themselves? "But transformation is hard", I hear you say. "It takes time and many organisations just haven't had time to complete the job. What you ask isn't fair". And indeed, transformation is hard so let's relax the criteria a bit - how many organisations have actually managed to establish even the start of a real agile culture?

Agility, Organisational ChangeDave Martin29 November 2017organisational change, anti patternsComment

Are Hyperproductive Teams Real?

We have all heard the story of the hyperproductive team. That beautiful creation that is 400% more effective that regular teams. The team that never stops getting better. But how many of us have actually seen such a thing in the flesh? I have been lucky enough to see one or two but most teams never reach those lofty heights. Why? Is it because we have the wrong people? Not smart enough? Not talented enough? Not committed enough? I don't think so. I have seen very talented teams struggle while teams that had much less raw talent went on to do great things. Although talent helps, there is no guarantee that a talented team will become hyperproductive and a less talented team will not.

Is it the methodology they use? Is scrum the recipe for hyperproductive teams? Is it Kanban? Crystal? SAFe? Less? Again, none of these things seem to matter. I have seen teams struggle and succeed with all methodologies. So what is it then that allows some teams to become hyperproductive? In my experience, there is one thing that allowed my hyperproductive teams to become hyperproductive - they are parts of hyperproductive organisations. The hyperproductive team is a myth.

Agility, Organisational ChangeDave Martin15 November 2017team, organisational change, efficiencyComment