Harnessing the promise of Agility

What is the promise of Agility, and have you benefitted from it? What if I told you, I already know the answer to that question? 

First, the promise of Agility is summed up well in Jonathan Smart’s book Sooner Safer Happier (short video here), which I’ll paraphrase as; 

“In the Digital Age, characterized by uncertainty and volatility, focus on delivering more outcomes of value to your customers sooner.” 

This has resulted in a 20x improvement in quality and a 3x improvement in flow efficiency (20x in the best teams).  

Those improvements came not from a “Capital A, Capital T” Agile Transformation (which, from an employee’s perspective, implies involuntary, mandatory change being done to you, whether you like it or not), but from following a few basic principles. 

In the 16th State of Agile Report published in late 2022, only 20% of respondents reported being “very satisfied” with the outcomes of agile (50% were “somewhat satisfied,” and the remaining 30% being dissatisfied to some extent).

Now, if organizations were seeing 20x improvements in quality and lead time, the ‘very satisfied’ number would logically be closer to 80%, not 20%.  

If you are in the 20% camp, congratulations: your agile journey has been and will probably continue to be successful.  

Statistically however, you are likely in the remaining 80%. Not all is lost. Hope remains. I will present you with some alternative approaches over the course of a few articles to help you achieve the kinds of outcomes Jonathan writes about.

These alternatives seek to answer a variety of challenges, issues, and obstacles that stymied many organizations I’ve worked with in the past 20-years.  

One of the most fundamental issues many organizations endure as they attempt to become agile, is that the business and IT sides are unable to align on important factors.

Further, the business side fails to acknowledge the success that an agile IT department can bring, resulting in success metrics that have little to do with outcomes.  

In this article, I’ll be sharing my own experience, supported by evidence. 

By early 2016, the growth of Agile within Fannie Mae was (reference): 

• 4,900 people participated in Agile training
• 60% of 155 Scrum teams supported by coaches
• Agile COE focused on developing an ecosystem to support portfolio adoption and maturity (not dictating/mandating) 

Despite the success, Fannie Mae “struggled to get consistent business engagement in agile development initiatives”, with the organization “viewing initiatives as a technology effort, not core to the business.” 

This was apparent in their continued focus on the output (number of agile teams set up as a success metric), instead of the achievement of business outcomes these teams were implementing.  

In mid-2016 I coached the first three teams in a business-lead approach to Agile called ‘Way of Working/Agile (WoW/Agile)’.

It’s a major component of how Fannie Mae developed and launched new products. 

Using WoW/Agile, I helped introduce: 

• Design Thinking, a customer-centric and outcome-driven approach to delivering value
• Lean Startup, an experimentation-driven approach to validated learning to test our product hypotheses 

As I was leading this innovative product delivery approach, the business realized that setting up agile teams to deliver that success was not just a technology effort; it was core to their success.  

This epiphany came at a crucial period too.

The resulting people-powered innovation engine came in handy when the pandemic struck and quickly became a financial crisis for many.  

In 2022 the CIO of Fannie Mae, Ramon Richards stated that,

We took advantage of those capabilities to deliver a payment deferral function for the company faster than we had delivered that type of function in the past. It was an early example of the potential, and I think it also helped in motivating and inspiring a lot of our folks to set the company up for future success delivering products that would benefit homeowners and renters.

Leveraging Design Thinking and Lean Startup approaches must be led by the business, so the resulting teams and ways of working naturally combine business/technology efforts.

The breaking down of silos and trust barriers is pivotal to success.