How agile is your team? Five questions to check

Such flexible methodologies like Lean Startup and Scrum will help you understand what customers want and how to give it to them as soon as possible. The strongest Agile teams follow five basic patterns. To see if your workflow is consistent with Agile principles, check how much you follow these patterns. To remain flexible, follow these patterns all the time.

Creative organizations, teams and individuals can achieve outstanding results if they continually increase their flexibility. Process experts usually propagate Agile methodologies specific to a particular field. Agile-methodologies seek to quickly catch environmental changes, immediately adapt to them and quickly create solutions. They learn to cope with chaos in order to gain a competitive advantage.
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We reluctantly pay for fast adaptation and evolution - we increase the frequency of releases 10 times, clenching our teeth, suffer at meetings and scold scram masters, automate what we used to do manually, review dates on contracts, train personnel and so on - all because that chaos is not going anywhere. And if we cope with chaos better than our competitors, we win.

We can not accurately answer the question: are we an Agile team? Absolutely "flexible" teams do not exist. But we can answer as far as we comply with the principles of Agile. We can be more or less “flexible” than we were before; more or less flexible than a competitor.

We need guidance to understand how flexible we are. In recent months, I have classified every Agile practice that I could find in different areas, in accordance with the five main Agile patterns. Each flexible methodology we admire corresponds to at least some basic Agile patterns. If not, then this is a sign indicating the weaknesses of this methodology.

So, let's start ...

Basic Agile Patterns

Agile organizations / teams following ...

• measure economic progress (for example: speed, consumer loyalty index, number of transitions, dynamics of changes in metrics that correspond to the company's strategy),
• conducting experiments for the sake of improvements (i.e., conducting retrospectives in Scrum, actively working with the feedback in Lean Startup),
• limit the number of simultaneously performed tasks (i.e., track each sprint, work only on specific tasks).

Stable organizations / teams following Agile principles ...

• take on collective responsibility (this can manifest itself as part of planning a sprint or forming a responsibility to the owner of the product in Scrum, collective ownership of the code in XP).

Expanding organizations / teams following Agile principles ...

• solve problems systematically (for example, they use the five “why” method, the theory of constraints).

The first three models allow you to create something that I call “fragile Agile”. If you measure economic progress, constantly experiment and limit the number of open tasks in the sprint, it means that you know how to react to changes, adapt and work quickly. But you do not last long.

Any serious changes in such systems extremely negatively affect the capabilities of the company and its market. When you lose an important team member, when competitors suddenly change direction, or when managers review a strategy, you remain in a team that can no longer quickly adapt, feel market changes and produce something quickly.

The adoption of the fourth pattern gives us a "steady Agile". Collective responsibility (or just personal responsibility for the individual) motivates people to look for the missing team skills, explore market changes and learn. Noncritical changes simply motivate people to learn more.

The fifth pattern, “solve problems systematically,” expands our expertise and allows us to use approaches that go beyond our Agile team or company. There are no hard boundaries between the “flexible” organization and its environment. Yes, we continue to take collective responsibility: to fix problems in the product - our work; but the solutions we found may be useful to our suppliers, bosses, other departments - for the common benefit. Toyota had to train not only its suppliers, but even its rival General Motors, to accept Toyota’s production system to facilitate the process of adapting to constant changes.

Jeff Sutherland (one of the creators of Scrum) recently challenged me to find the exact definition of flexibility. Having found nothing, I invented it myself. Are these five patterns enough to define sustainable flexible methodologies? Yes. Is there at least one non-Agile approach that matches at least one of these five basic patterns? Not. Go ahead!

We measure "flexibility"

Now that we have defined definition of flexibility, you can evaluate your own flexibility by answering these questions:

1. How easily and often do we measure our economic progress?

Do we count our unit economy? Do we have associated strategies and metrics? What metrics capture our main indicators? Can we improve our performance to better match the company's strategy and the economy as a whole?

2. Do we experiment for the sake of improvements?

How actively do we compare the expected indicators of economic development with the actual result of our experiments (namely, with iterations, sprints or the development life cycle)? When we change the process (restrictions on the number of open tasks, sprint length, completion criteria, readiness criteria, methodology, etc.), do we base our decision on something that we can measure? Do we test our hypotheses? If we have agreed and adhere to the established process, do we conduct controlled experiments?

3. Do we limit open tasks?

How many we have done work that are not included in the release? How long are our sprints? How about our planning? Do we spend a lot of resources on planning, evaluating, designing? Will we get the same result if we spend less time on development, planning, evaluation and design?

4. Do we have collective responsibility?

How many people in our team felt personally responsible for the recent problems of the team, did they change their behavior to prevent these problems in the future? Do we help each other?

As part of the audit, it is possible to identify obvious signs that employees and managers do not feel collective responsibility: do we deny the existence of the problem? Do we often blame others? (If good employees suddenly and mysteriously disappear from your company, then you probably have this problem). Do we blame organizational policy and company structure for our problems? Do we feel guilty (do we blame ourselves for anything)? Do you rush to work like a zombie just because we need to pay bills?

5. Do we solve problems systematically?

When we last encountered a problem, did we limit the discussion to discussing obvious reasons, or did we persistently investigate, search for systematically arising reasons, invent more reliable solutions and protect them, perhaps even outside the team? Does the company encourage such research and reward people who are really trying to figure it out?

By answering these questions, you assess your flexibility. What is your organization: is it fragile, stable or expanding? But do not stop there, ask the same questions to your colleagues. What about your executives? How flexible are they? What simple, least politically dangerous measures can they take to increase the flexibility of an organization?

Of course, the fact is that these questions will not only help you assess how quickly you identify the main obstacles and react to external changes; These questions will help you improve these processes. And this is exactly what you want to know when you ask: “How much do we comply with the principles of Agile”, right?



PS Dan Greening (author of the original) is one of the speakers of the thematic conference Lean Kanban Russia , which will be held in Moscow from October 2 to 3, 2015. Registration is now open - we invite you to actively participate!