AGILE: HOW TO GET IN THE GAME (AND NOT GET IN THE WAY)

by Darrell K. Rigby

Ask general managers what they know about agile, and chances are they’ll respond with an uneasy smile and a deflecting quip such as “just enough to be dangerous.” They may pepper conversations with terms like “sprints” and “time boxes,” use agile as an adjective to describe some new initiative, and claim that their businesses are becoming more and more nimble. But because they haven’t studied the methodology behind agile practices or seen agile teams in action, they couldn’t really tell you what agile is all about or how it’s actually working in their organization.

What is agile? It’s a mindset and a method for improving innovation through deep customer collaboration and adaptive testing and learning. Here’s how it works.

Agile teams are small, cross-functional, fully dedicated work groups focused on creating innovative improvements to customer products and services, the business processes that produce them, and the technologies that enable those processes. Each team has an “owner” who is ultimately responsible for delivering value to customers, and a “coach” who helps the team continuously improve its speed, effectiveness, and happiness. Team members break complex problems into small modules and then start building working versions of potential solutions in short cycles (less than a month) known as sprints. The process is transparent to everyone. Team members hold brief daily “stand-up” meetings to review progress and identify roadblocks. They resolve disagreements through experimentation and feedback rather than endless debates or appeals to authority. They test small working prototypes of part or all of the offering with a few customers for short periods of time. If customers get excited, a prototype may be released immediately, even if some senior executive isn’t a fan, or others think it needs more bells and whistles. The team then brainstorms ways to improve future cycles and prepares to attack the next top priority.

When general managers lack this foundational understanding, their everyday ways of working make adoption of agile—and eventual success—nearly impossible. These managers launch countless initiatives with urgent deadlines instead of assigning the highest priority to two or three. They spread themselves and their best people across too many projects rather than concentrating everyone’s energy on full-time, focused teams. Many managers become overly involved in the work of project teams. They routinely overturn team decisions and add review layers and controls, trying (usually in vain) to keep mistakes from being repeated but, in the meantime, hampering the speed of innovation. With the best of intentions, they erode the benefits that agile innovation can deliver.

Sound familiar? Too many companies suffer from too much bureaucracy and not enough innovation. Their organizations are unbalanced. Bureaucratic processes originally designed to make successful practices repeatable and scalable have taken over. They have created static business systems—systems that are incapable of adapting to dynamic markets.

The solution to this problem already exists in thousands of companies. Trouble is, it’s often hidden inside IT, whose techniques and terminology already intimidate other departments. But the IT folks are onto something: agile has revolutionized technology development over the last 30 years. According to a 2018 survey by the website Stack Overflow, 85% of software developers use agile techniques in their work. Agile increases team productivity and employee satisfaction. It minimizes the waste inherent in redundant meetings, repetitive planning, excessive documentation, quality defects, and low-value product features. By improving visibility and continually adapting to customers’ changing priorities, agile boosts customer engagement and satisfaction, brings the most valuable products and features to market faster and more predictably, and reduces risk. When agile engages team members from multiple disciplines as collaborative peers, it broadens organizational experience and builds mutual trust and respect.

Results like these are now driving agile into more functions and industries. Digital natives such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Riot Games, and Spotify have led the way in scaling agile across a wide range of innovation activities. John Deere, the farm-equipment manufacturer, has used agile methods to develop new machinery. Mission Bell Winery has used them for everything from wine production to warehousing. C. H. Robinson, a global third-party logistics provider, has applied them in human resources. The list goes on. OpenView has used agile to run its venture capital fund; USAA, to transform its customer service; and 3M, to run a major merger integration. Bosch—a global supplier of technology and services with more than 400,000 associates—has adopted agile principles to guide a step-by-step reshaping of the company, including everything from supply-chain management and product development to marketing and strategic planning.

How can your company or team take advantage of agile? This book will help you in two ways. If your organization is adopting or expanding agile practices, it will give you the baseline understanding you need to join in the conversation. It will demystify the concept and build a strong foundation for future learning. At the same time, it will enable you to avoid being an impediment. Sure, agile is sometimes accompanied by off-putting jargon (scrum, kanban), indecipherable acronyms (FROCC, MoSCoW), and zealots who often overstate both its uses and its benefits. At root, though, agile is a simple, practical approach to innovation that every manager can master—and actually enjoy.

To support agile teams, general managers may need to adapt elements of the business’s operating model. They have a lot of levers at their disposal: clarifying ambitions; changing leadership styles and cultures; redefining roles and decisions rights; changing planning, budgeting, and reviewing systems; revamping hiring and talent management systems; and increasing the agility of business processes and technologies. Organization structures may need to change as well. Deciding which tools to deploy, in what sequence, and to what degree requires considerable testing, learning, balancing, and customization.

Agile is not a panacea. It is most effective and easiest to implement where the problem to be solved is complex; solutions are initially unknown, and product requirements will most likely change; the work can be modularized; and close collaboration with end users (and rapid feedback from them) is feasible. These conditions exist for many product development functions, marketing projects, strategic-planning activities, supply-chain challenges, and resource allocation decisions. They are less common in routine operations such as plant maintenance, purchasing, sales calls, and accounting.

The greatest impediment to agile success is not the need for better methodologies, more evidence of significant benefits, or proof that agile can work outside IT. It is the mindset and behavior of managers and executives. Those who learn to lead agile’s extension into a broader range of business activities will accelerate profitable growth. This book provides a great start.