Talk: How to be Agile Without Scrum

Talk description

Title:	How to be Agile Without Scrum
Short synopsis:	Implement Scrum and almost everyone will be impacted by the change. Change is a stressor. Too much stress is unhealthy for people. When people feel too much stress, they resist. Why so many failed Agile transformations? Because Scrum is too hard. Alternatively, Kanban is a method improving services to customers. Kanban stimulates meaningful conversation and provides pragmatic guidance on how to improve service delivery. This is a management activity. No one else need be disrupted or engaged. Max size: 500 chars
Long synopsis (optional):	Scrum is not Agile. Scrum does not necessarily make you agile. Scrum can make you less agile. There is a powerful alternative: Kanban. Agile is not the goal. Business agility is closer. How does a business improve? First, we need to understand its nature and purpose. Business is a kind of enterprise. The nature of enterprise is to take some risks in order to achieve some reward. The goal then, is the reward. Reward can come in many forms but ultimately there is a desired reward driving every enterprise. The nature of a business enterprise is to take on the risks associated with providing services to customers. The purpose of our desired customers shapes the purpose of the services provided by the business enterprise. How agile do you need to be? As agile as your customers need you to be. The idea that Scrum will make your business more Agile or that Scrum alone is enough, are assumptions that need to be validated. Yet, by definition according to the Scrum Guide, Scrum only exists in its entirety. In other words, you are not doing Scrum unless you are doing all of Scrum. Adopting all of Scrum on a large scale all at once is risky. All change is inherently risky. Change is risky because when we change something in a complex adaptive system, we don’t know how the system will respond until after it has responded. When you implement Scrum, you don’t know how it will go. You can’t, that’s the nature of complexity and knowledge work almost always resides in the complex domain. Scrum is a framework for organizing people. Agile scaling frameworks such as SAFe essentially do so on a larger scale. Adopting such frameworks almost always demands a lot of change in how people are organized, roles, responsibilities, reporting relationships, policies, governance, etc. Agile transformations, which have historically almost always showcased some kind of broad Scrum implementation, are revolutionary by nature. Implement Scrum (and/or SAFe) and almost everyone will be impacted by some change in the organization. Change is a stressor. Too much stress is unhealthy for people. When people feel too much stress, they don’t like it and they resist. When you push someone, the natural response is for them to push back. In over a decade in the business, I have experienced all kinds of push back to Scrum implementations. This push back, or resistance, is the primary cause of change failure. Why are there so many stories of failed Agile transformations? It is because Scrum is too much of a stressor. The organization rejects it like an organism rejects a foreign substance. If you force more of the foreign substance into the organism, it will begin to break down and will eventually die. Is it possible for an Agile transformation to not end this way? Yes, of course. Just as some organisms can adapt rapidly and survive extreme stressors, so too can some organizations. But then, we need to ask, at what cost? Because ultimately there is an economic problem we are trying to solve. And herein lies the rub: It is impossible to know what the cost of an Agile transformation will be until it’s fully paid for, which may be never. There are however some costs that we can anticipate. One of the clearest examples of the cost of wholesale revolutionary change is churn. When you launch an Agile transformation, you should expect at least 30% of directly impacted employees to leave your company within the first few months. Why? because the stressors of the disruptive change will make them unhappy enough about their jobs that they quit. Or maybe it’s not clear how they fit and so they are discarded as part of the old regime. An Agile transformation is an expensive strategy for getting rid of people, but it works. How much does this cost? It is nearly impossible to estimate the economic impact of your most valuable asset—knowledge—walking out the door, most likely never to return. What is that knowledge worth? How much does it cost to replace, and to rebuild the organizational knowledge that has been lost? How is Kanban an alternative? In its essence, Kanban is an evolutionary change management method for improving services to customers. In other words, Kanban is a stimulant for improved management behaviour such that managers become oriented around services, focused on customers and less preoccupied with how to organize people. Kanban stimulates this meaningful conversation and provides pragmatic guidance on how to improve service delivery with the scientific method, incrementally, with meaningful data. There is no reorg required. If you haven’t already embarked on an Agile transformation reorg around Agile teams, you don’t need to start there. Instead, start with understanding the purpose of the service and how the service can be fitter for that purpose. The Systems Thinking Approach to Introducing Kanban (STATIK) is the guide for the initial design of your Kanban service delivery system. This is a management activity. No one else need be disrupted or engaged. Max size: 5000 chars
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