By: Jeff Dalton
Everywhere
we look, including every CMMI and Agile appraisal I’ve done in the last decade,
technology leaders in large companies are asking about scaling agility.
But
it’s the wrong question. They should be asking how to scale self-organization.
For
centuries business has been led using a proven hierarchical, low-trust,
command-and-control model that has its roots in the successful Roman military
machine, and is still taught today in MBA programs from Cambridge to Ann Arbor. It’s a model that is in professional DNA, and
self-organization, a foundational characteristic of agility, is absent.
In
recent years, many businesses have been attempting to transition from traditional
hierarchies to self-organizing models based on the “rules of nature,” a system that more closely resembles
the controlled chaos of the natural world. They start with the premise that humans
naturally demonstrate certain behavior patterns, and it makes sense to leverage
these, rather than re-program them to fit into more traditional hierarchical
models. Agile frameworks like Scrum, as well as self-organizing performance models
like the Agile Performance Holarchy, are good examples of this.
These models invert the hierarchy,
transforming leaders into stewards of the a self-organizing behavioral architecture,
with team roles and accountabilities dispersed
throughout the organization in a way that allows people go about the messy
process of self-organization and improved performance. In an agile world, team
members are empowered to make important decisions within the context of the behavioral
architecture without having to ask permission from a supervisor or manager.
But don’t expect all mangers, or
the schools where MBA students who are eager to lead are graduating, to come
along willingly. To ask them to change
is to ask them to transform themselves after a lifetime of learning how to
succeed in a hierarchical world. This might
have been best articulated by Benjamin Disreaeli, who upon becoming the Prime
Minister of the UK said “I have climbed to the top of a greasy pole!.” Indeed.
Why Agile Matters
According
to the CMMI Institute, over seventy percent of organizations who have achieved
a CMMI rating in the last three years describe at least some of their projects as
“agile.” This is a dramatic increase over previous
years that has deep-rooted cultural and operational implications. There are good reasons for leaders to
transition to self-organizing models, but significant cultural change,
especially among leaders, will need to take place to ensure success.
Agile
frameworks reduce the cost of failure. It
is conventional wisdom in the technology industry that failure is inevitable,
with many companies seeing failure rates as high as 70 percent. Research conducted by organizations such as
the Project Management Institute and the Software Engineering Institute has
consistently confirmed high failure rates, so it makes sense to seek solutions
that assume failure, not success, and to simply reduce its cost. All agile frameworks, with their incremental
and iterative development model, support the idea of “fail-fast.”
Failure
is not just an option; it’s a requirement. A
foundational premise of agile is to acknowledge that failure is normal, and we
should plan to fail fast and learn as much as we can. This reduces a project’s
cost while allowing teams to redirect efforts toward a more successful approach
through the use of experimentation, retrospectives, and short, timeboxed
iterations. Quality professionals will recognize this as an application of W.
Edwards Deming’s “plan-do-check-act” framework of continuous improvement
applied in short iterations.
Agile
methods deliver business value to end-users more quickly. Value
is delivered more quickly with an iterative and incremental delivery approach
due to low-value features being de-prioritized or discarded, freeing up
valuable resources to focus on the high-priority needs of the customer.
Self-organization
pushes decision-making downward, freeing leaders to focus on strategy. For
decades, the technology industry has explored ways to push decisions downward.
Agile frameworks finally provide a model that can make that a reality, if only
leaders are willing to accept their role as enablers rather than task managers.
A successful agile team requires minimal over- sight, makes day-to-day
operational decisions, collaborates with business customers, and delivers
business value without the need for continuous management intervention.
Agile
complements important IT industry models. If
CMMI®, ISO 9001, and the PMBOK® Guide are
models we use, agile is something we are. For example, CMMI has a
perspective of defining what needs to occur for a product or service to be
successfully and consistently deliver, and to improve the process, while agile values describe why we take those
actions. If adopted in this way, rather as only a marketing tool to receive a
rating, CMMI makes agile stronger.
Big
Agile is Coming
Since
2016, General Motors, the Department of Defense, Health and Human Services,
Fiat Chrysler, and other large companies have begun to adopt agile within their
software organizations, and along with their combined $100 Billion IT budgets
they are bringing their biases, bureaucracies, documentation, and leadership
infrastructure with them. What will be
the effect on the agile community?
“Big
Agile” requires leadership at all levels, just not the kind we are used to.
Simply working with an agile coach to implement well-known ceremonies is not
enough. Metaphorically, the leadership “operating system” needs an upgrade.
In
today’s corporate hierarchies where command-and-control structures, low trust,
long-term planning, and risk management reign supreme, the skills required to thrive
and survive are anything but agile. This leaves agile teams to push the culture
uphill, leading to unpredictable results once business operations expand beyond
the boundaries of the core agile team. This creates a “cultural
type-mismatch” due to information
technology, operations, marketing, infrastructure, business development, sales,
and end-users not being on the same cultural page.
Performing
agile ceremonies and techniques without self-organization isn’t agile at all.
There is nothing inherently wrong with adopting ceremonies and techniques
identified as being agile, and many companies have found some success with
that, but the power of agile values and their associated frameworks grows
exponentially once self-organization is perfected.
What to do about it?
Tomorrow’s leaders, and the schools and corporate
mentoring programs that train them, will need to transition their mission from that
of command-and-control task manager to one of an architect and operator of a
self-organizing infrastructure. This
includes changes in culture, training, and performance monitoring with a bias
towards high-trust, peer accountability and self-governance. Two models that can help new leaders prepare for
the future are the Capability Maturity Model
Integration V2.0
® and the Agile Performance Holarchy (APH).
CMMI V2.0 provides guidance for leaders to consider
while implementing improvements to organizational process systems, and
currently contains twenty Practice Areas, with three that specifically apply to
solving this problem: Governance (GOV), Process Management (PCM), and
Implementation Infrastructure (II). These
three Practices Areas each contain practices that can help leaders formulate a
plan, as well as develop and deploy a system, for a new, self-organizing
operating model.
The Agile Performance Holarchy is a leadership model
that provides a definition of a self-organizing agile architecture, with
objectives, desired outcomes, and set of behavioral guiderails for agile
leaders and teams seeking to master self-organization and large-scale agility. The APH currently contains six Performance
Circles that address Leadership, Craftsmanship, Providing Infrastructure,
Affirming Quality, Teaming, and Envisioning Solutions.
Culture Needs to Change
Jim Bouchard, author of The Sensei Leader, sums it up for leaders: “Don’t even attempt to transform your organization until you can transform yourself.”
Jeff Dalton is CEO of Broadsword Solutions Corporation. He is a Certified SCAMPI Lead Appraiser, CMMI Instructor, Certified Agile Assessor, author, and keynote speaker. His new book, Great Big Agile: an OS for Agile Leaders (© 2018), is now available on Amazon.
