What's the first thing you do when you look at a map? Find your destination? Maybe. Start planning a route? Sounds logical. But there is something missing. One fundamental step that renders the other two useless. That first step is locating where you are. Obvious really, but essential. Unless you can position yourself accurately on the map, no amount of accuracy in destination identification, or time spent in route planning, will get you where you want to go.

That's obvious when looking at a map. Very few of us (my mother excluded) will locate our destination then confidently set off without working out where we are now. My mother, on the other hand, will locate her destination, see that it is on the left hand side of the map and confidently set out towards the left. Consequently her excursions often end up in interesting places. Trouble is, the same principle applies to organisational change and in that context, very few of us perform the first step. We jump straight into desired state, plan a few actions and off we go. We don't spend much time, if any, on step one. We don't measure where we are first. The result is exactly the same as looking at a map without locating youself on it. You will start off confidently in a random direction and end up... somewhere. If it's at your intended destination that will be by good luck (or the help of someone you asked for directions) rather than good map reading.

When talking to stakeholders about why they want their project to go agile, the most common reason they give is speed. Faster time to market. Faster delivery. Fast, fast fast. If you dig a little deeper though, and ask what they mean by fast, they don't say things like "before our competitors", they will say things like "when you promised it". A lot of the time, speed is a kind of code for "no delays". Make us a commitment and stick to it. Don't jerk us around. What they are really looking for a lot of the time is not more speed in delivery but more predictability.

Predictability is really important to the wider business. They may have trade shows booked, advertising campaigns locked in, shareholder briefings prepared. If commitments aren't met, it can have big impacts on the rest of the organisation. I know of one organisation who sent out letters to a million customers advising of a change on a particular date, only for that date to slip by 6 months. Not only is that not a good look, it's expensive too, as a million other letters needed to be sent out advising that the change would not, in fact, be happening, then another million when the new date was announced. Fortunately, an agile approach is ideally suited to giving the business the certainty it needs. How can this be when the agile approach doesn't try to lock down everything in advance? How can you have predictability without certainty?

As soon as someone starts looking at the topic of metrics, the measurement fallacy pricks up its ears (I always imagine it looking somewhat rodent-like with mangy fur, evil eyes and sharp teeth) and gets ready to emerge from its hole behind the database server. When people start discussing what should be measured in order to keep track of a process, it gets ready to strike. Most people have fallen prey to it at one point or other. Mostly without ever knowing they have been bitten. The bite is painless. The only symptom is that the bitten suddenly assumes that because we can measure something, it must be important. More serious cases assume that the easier something is to measure, the more important it must be. This dreadful scourge is responsible for making Lines Of Code the primary measure of developer output for years.

It's a typical case of a severe bite - we can measure lines of code. Therefore it must be an important measurement. It's really easy to measure so it must be a really important measurement. Therefore we must measure it and use it to drive developer behaviour. Once it sets in, it's hard to shift. Despite the fact that the behaviour it drove - writing masses of wordy code to inflate your LOC counts and never, ever remove code - was completely counterproductive, the LOC (or KLOC) still hangs around to this day.