Adjail for all: how to make an accountant be flexible

Transparency, control, a sense of progress, easy and informal transfer of tasks are the right companions of flexible methodologies. We have worked in software companies for many years and are accustomed to the benefits that Agile gives. When we started to make the Button , most of which is the offline work of accountants, lawyers and business assistants , the first question we asked was: “Will agile work in an accounting company?” Now we will surely answer yes, but first we had to attach a lot of effort. About this today and tell.

Why should accounting companies be flexible?

A typical accounting company in a vacuum is a dozen women: a director, secretary and 10 accountants. Usually they serve 100–200 customers. Accountants often have a specialization: one deals with salaries, two slaughters the primary organization, and the rest advise clients, keep records and submit reports. All the goals declared in the first paragraph are easily achieved: control and transparency - at the expense of a small team, in which everything is visible, and the transfer of tasks is not required at all. But there is one problem.



We met with dozens of bookkeeping companies, and almost all of them can’t overcome the 10–20 employees line and 100–200 customers. Attracting more customers is not a problem, but then you will need to hire more accountants, and this will be followed by a paralysis of service and management. Some people will start freezing, playing solitaire, chasing tea, and everyone will forget about reports and taxes.

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Professional reformation

Accountants are very fond of living and working in the conditions of regulation of all processes, when there is an approved policy for each particular case. For this reason, the average price list of the accounting company looks like this:







Formal customer relationships help protect oneself from unnecessary work, but lead to funny situations. The accountant can violently extort from the entrepreneur or even from his employee (under the fear of non-payment of salary, for example) some insignificant piece of paper, the absence of which will lead to additional taxation of only two hundred rubles. Often this is done at the last moment, the accountant spends a couple of sleepless nights, checks the balance to kopecks, heroically sends statements to the last minutes of the passing day, and then wonders why no one appreciated his work.



The world is not perfect, and it is impossible to make an ideal accounting balance. It is important to remember what is really important, and follow the Pareto rule: only a bookkeeper cares about charging a couple of hundred rubles, you should not take the brain around because of the minimal likelihood of incurring minimal losses. Flexibility in relations with clients and “creative approach” to solving accounting problems saves the time of an accountant and the nerves of an entrepreneur. Unfortunately, the regulation says to act in the interests of accounting, and not in the interests of business, and in order to break out of this vicious circle, it is necessary to rethink the approach to business at a conceptual level.

Is it possible to cope with this without adjail?

Sure you may. Developers, after all, also work without Adjail, with the overwhelming majority. Do you know this fascinating world of technical specifications, regulations, acceptance tests and network schedules with the least critical path? Accountants are not developers, the work of the accounting company is more like a network restaurant, for example, the long-suffering McDonalds. You can rape accountants in this style, introduce KPI, regulations, and tight control over robots . We didn’t do that, because we love Starbucks more :)



Why this approach does not work:

1. No one has yet made a more or less massive service history with a large number of employees and customers from the accounting company. It is completely incomprehensible what KPIs and regulations can be based on (except for the sick imagination of the director who, 5 years ago, tied up with the profession of an accountant :)
2. To monitor the implementation of the regulations, we need either special people (about one per ten employees), or very serious automation. Automation is long, expensive, and the worst thing is, these investments may simply not pay off.
3. Accountants learn all their lives, they are quite developed personalities with a deep inner world, and do not want to be silent KPI attainers.

That is why an average accounting company cannot turn from a local business into a federal or even international one. We have long overcome the mark of 200 clients and are ready to accept 1000, and all thanks to the secret knowledge that we have brought from the marginal sphere of web development :)

How to inspire an accountant from the province to live according to ajaila

In the Scram button there are not only developers and designers. Accountants, lawyers, business assistants and even business personnel spend ten-minute stand-ups in the morning and evening, plan two-week iterations, use stickers, whiteboards and all the accompanying attributes of stylish, fashionable, youth practices. But all this does not make any practical sense, if people do not have a clear understanding of what advantages this approach gives them. This statement, by the way, is also true for IT.





Push-button scars. Thousands of them



One desire is not enough, you need to show people the bright path and develop a useful habit. At first it was not easy: Ajailu was treated as a formal process and an extravagance of "these strange IT people." The accountant “out of the box” is not ready to observe strange rituals, to come to the general scrum-meeting in time and silently listen for ten minutes and listen attentively to colleagues. For the first 8 months each scram began with expressive moral teachings from the mouths of scrum masters who left few people indifferent. From the outside, this is more like tyranny and ordinary fascism, but, unfortunately, the carrot method does not work at all: discipline is required. While you are doing your job, you are your own boss, but the head of the scram is a scrum master . You have to be silent and come on time, if you do not want to feel like a naughty kitten.



Scrum-rally is just an example, a similar approach should be used with all practices, otherwise your presentations, planning and reflection will turn into a non-constructive bazaar that can last for hours. An important ideological remark: Scrum Master is not the top of the hierarchy, he cannot give you instructions in his spare time. Scrum master is the owner of the process, the mouthpiece of the methodology. That is, at a rally, you submit not to a person, but to a process that otherwise would simply be destroyed. Also, for example, at the time of the attack, the football goalkeeper coordinates the game of defenders, although, formally, he is not their leader, does not lead coaching, does not follow their regime and does not affect their fate outside the football field. The goalkeeper's task is to control the whole picture at a dangerous moment, the task of the defenders is to control his own plot.



Another problem: create a real sense of equality and partnership. The most striking example is the chief accountants. Over the years, a representative of this species gets used to his status as a gray cardinal, gets used to the idea that he is the second (and even the first) head of the company. Hence the neglect of younger accountants, developers and other "lower classes." In Ajaila, such a distribution of roles is unacceptable: authoritarianism prevents people from making intelligent decisions and boldly going beyond their formal role. Once someone “turns on the leader”, someone should not believe that it is possible to live differently. Therefore, we have stopped such manifestations very harshly so as not to jeopardize the entire implementation of the Ajail.





Morning scrum of primary accountants

There is only one conclusion: the main thing in flexible methodologies is rigidity. Processes must be flexible, not the rules of the game. Now our main way of implementing the Ajail is: “you simply have no way out, even if you are an accountant” :)

Not everyone is ready to work in such a rhythm, with some people just had to part. Now we are at the entrance to warn how everything will be arranged, and do not take accountants who seem to be not flexible enough. Dismissing the wrong people and recruiting the right people, we have accumulated a critical mass saturated with the Ajile culture. We no longer have to spend a lot of time for forcing happiness and fighting against conservatism - enlightenment comes to the newcomer already in the course of teamwork, we are only pushing a little.



Positive motivation, of course, is more important than negative stimulation, so each newcomer goes through a two-day onboarding. We tell a lot about 4 pivots that we had to make in the first year of the project’s life, and how SCRUM and Lean helped make the right decisions at these critical moments.



For example, in one not very beautiful moment, we noticed that it is not fanatically following the ideology of the Ajail. We didn’t have a truly cross-functional accountants: accountants in teams advised clients, and completely different people were involved in accounting, gathered in a separate “bukhbandu”. From here grew the legs of most of the problems that are familiar to anyone who has ever worked in a functionally arranged company with a bunch of departments and services: ping-pong tasks, diluting responsibility, lack of personal initiative.



We abolished the back office and distributed all payroll accountants and leading accountants to service teams - as close as possible to the source of the tasks. In addition to accountants, each team has a lawyer and a business assistant . Teamwork helps them to understand the client’s business and solve its tasks instead of achieving their own goals, divorced from reality.





Push-button cluster "Cosmos", team "Union" and "World"

Limits of applicability of a scram

One of the main problems is the nature of the accountant’s activities. This is an endless process, if you draw parallels with the development, it is more like the use of software, rather than creation. Here iterations are not always good. The newfangled spirit known as holacracy helps us. This approach to the management and distribution of responsibility allows you to get rid of the hierarchy in the company. Each employee (holacratia suggests replacing the word “employee” with the word “partner”) falls into conditions that in the post-Soviet space are called “work for yourself”, continuously changes and improves something in the part of the business for which he is responsible. But this is a big topic for a separate article, which we will definitely write when we fully enjoy the charms of holacracy.



From the heap of text, six captain rules can be distinguished, which will help to introduce agil in any team (they will help and not do all the work, do not treat them like a silver pool):

1. The whole company should live on agile. There can be no exceptions even in those departments where flexible methodologies do not give explicit benefits. It is important to create the right culture.
2. Every person should understand why agil is necessary. If you can not articulate the need for agile, you may not need agile. If a person cannot understand the importance of the Ajail, you may not need a person.
3. Observance of rituals, like standapov, reflections and presentations may, but should not seem like a mere formality. These simple things help people not to close in their professional vacuum, to understand the goals and values ​​of the business. Rituals should become a duty, preferably a pleasant one.
4. You will need a person who will implant agil and fiercely monitor compliance with the practices. His fanaticism must border on fascism.
5. Replacing such a person with the rules in the case of the Ajile will not work. You can not work "according to the Ajile", you can only "be Ajile" :)
6. Planning should be given a lot of attention (but not time). At the same time, the iteration plan should be carried out at 100% (we have so far reached the level of 90%, but we are confidently moving forward). Those who are not fulfilled should first be thoroughly trolled, and then help organize the planning process.

One of the values ​​of the Button is to love learning and changing. We love to introduce new ideas and practices and are constantly looking for inspiration. We will be happy to find it in the comments. Please share your experience, it will definitely come in handy (and not only to us).