Agile Success Measures to answer the question "How do I know when I'm Agile"?

I often get asked, “How do I know when my company is Agile? ” While I have various answers, it led me to construct an Agile measurement framework that helps you guide your Agile transformation toward success.  

    

I start by asking, “What outcomes an organization would like to see when they go Agile?”  Agile asks that you consider your outcome instead of output as a measure of success.  I would suggest that being Agile should only occur if your outcome is some type of better business results.  In other words, Agile shouldn't be the outcome of being Agile.  The good news is that organizations are looking for better business results.  This could be in the form of shorter lead times, reduced whip, or an increase in revenue.  Sometimes it can be all three. It is important to understand that outcomes are lagging metrics.   Now that we have highlighted the importance of outcomes, let’s add two ingredients to give us perspective and help us build the framework.

For the first ingredient, I will take a page from the book Being Agile in Chapter 2 “Crossing the Agile Chasm”.  When we discuss Agile adoption, we are talking about a change to the organizational culture.  This is because adopting Agile is more than learning skills or understanding a procedure.  It is about adopting a set of values and principles that require change in people’s behavior and the culture of an organization.  This mindset and culture change involves the most time for an organization to adjust.  According to Paul S. Adler and Aaron Shenhar, “Adapting your Technological Base: The Organizational Challenge”, a culture change is measured in years.   

For the second ingredient, I will take a page out of the article Agile Lagging to Leading Metric Path.  This article highlights that an Agile lagging to leading metric path recommends that for every outcome (aka, lagging indicator), you supplement it with corresponding leading indicators that provide you with visibility during an Agile transformation.  Capturing the leading indicators helps you steer toward a successful Agile transformation.  The leading indicators are effectively feedback loops that help you understand if you are leading toward your outcome.

Now that we have the two key ingredients, the goal is constructing an Agile lagging to leading metric path that recognizes that change takes time and provides us with feedback to adapt toward a more successful Agile transformation.   Lets start with the outcome.  For my Agile transformation, the key outcome is that we are seeing better business results for our products, translated into increased revenue for our business.  From this, I need to consider what leading indicators help guide me toward better business results.   From my Agile transformation experience, I will suggest that the two broad leading indicators are adopting Agile mechanics and embracing the Agile mindset.   This is illustrated within this lagging to leading framework.

This illustrates several conventions.  The first is that from an Agile perspective, in order to get to better business results, we must educate folks on the Agile mechanics and Agile mindset.  As we do this, we gain feedback so that we can adapt the Agile journey to ensure more success in our Agile transformation and achieve the better business results we are looking for.  The second is that applying Agile mechanics tends to be easier and takes less time since it involves learning skills and understanding procedures.  Adopting an Agile mindset takes more time since it requires changes in people’s behavior and the adaption of the organizational culture.  The end result (outcome or lagging metric) is that we hope to see better business results by first implementing Agile mechanics and adapting to an Agile mindset. 

The last task at hand is to create measures within each indicator to gauge progress.  For the Agile mechanics, capturing a training metric is helpful.  In order for people to mechanically adopt Agile, they need some form of education in their role (e.g., Scrum Master, Product Owner, etc.) and education in the process (e.g., Scrum, Kanban, etc.).  Then you can assess if the mechanics are being applied.  If education doesn’t occur or the mechanics aren’t being followed, this can impact your success.

For the Agile mindset indicator, you need to gauge if there is a shift in ways of working. You can assess if the Scrum Master is exemplifying servant leadership, you can gauge if management are allowing for self-organization, you can assess if the team believes in the Agile values and principles, and you can determine if the product owner and organization are adapting to customer needs based on actual feedback and to delivering early and often.  You should also gauge if the team is incrementally improving the mechanics, meaning are they applying the retrospective for the team to improve their ways of working. If the behaviors behind the Agile mindset are not occurring, how do you expect to be Agile?   This is why they are all leading indicators to getting better business results. 

I hope this article may provide you with a framework to help you more effectively gauge “How do we know when we are Agile?”.  It highlights that if you are looking for the business benefits that Agile can bring, then establishing an Agile measurement framework based on lagging to leading indicators can help guide you achieve a more successful Agile transformation. It is then up to you to identify what is your outcome, then your leading indicators to know if you are heading in the right direction.  Many end their journey with adopting Agile mechanics without adapting their culture toward an Agile mindset.  Stopping at the mechanics is why many organizations fail at Agile.  Hopefully this framework can help you see the bigger picture toward Agile success and the business benefits it can bring.  

A great Agile book - Being Agile: Your Roadmap to a Successful Adoption of Agile

Being Agile is your roadmap to successfully transforming to an Agile culture. In this unique book, veteran Agile Coach Mario Moreira advises new and current adopters how to implement a robust Agile framework that emphasizes Agile values and principles over the mechanical elements. This book focuses on the business benefit of implementing Agile which focuses on delivering customer value and having a positive impact on revenue. 

This book begins by explaining that in order to truly cross the Agile chasm, there must be a transformation to the Agile culture that focuses on delivering customer value.  Mario shows maturing early adopters how to bridge the chasm between going through the motions of “doing Agile” and genuinely “being Agile.” 

It then delves into the business benefits of Agile and the often missing discussion that Agile supplements your strategy to help your business succeed.  The book highlights the important objectives of customer and employees matter, another area that often is underserved.  It briefly discussions some of the methodologies (including Scrum, Kanban, DSDM, Lean, VFQ, and XP), and the roles a team and organization can play within an Agile context. 

After a high-level synopsis of Agile, Mario reminds us that Agile is nothing more and nothing less than a set of values and principles.  This book delves deeply into a focus on the Agile values and principles.  This book dissects each value and principle that conveys whether they are really exhibited within a culture.  These values and principles must be observed, believed, and translated into actions as an important to precipitate a cultural shift. The book emphasizes the importance of keeping the values and principles always in mind.

The author then plunges into the nitty-gritty of the deploying Agile in a manner that will better achieve an Agile transformation.  He does this by introducing the reader to the Ready, Implement, Coach, and Hone (RICH) Deployment model.  The rubric of readiness engages and begins conditioning the mind toward the Agile mindset as well as focusing on the areas that need to be considered as you are embarking on your Agile journey.  He asks you to consider such factors as:

·         Evaluating team candidates for skills, behavior, and willingness 

·         Assessing Stakeholder buy-in and engagement

·         Determining Suitability for applying Agile

·         Identifying measures to see if you are Agile and if you are deriving the business benefits

·         Establishing a customer validation vision to engage in the critical customer feedback

·         Implementing Agile roles and identifying those best for these roles

·         Establishing an adaptable and scalable Agile framework

·         Determining your User story writing and grooming approach

·         Understanding story points for sizing and establishing a relative sizing framework

·         Establishing Educational needs and building an Agile community

·         Constructing Done criteria and how it helps with quality

Implement focuses on the timely application of agile elements within a team or organization while still maintaining emphasis on the Agile values and principles. Coach focuses on on-boarding teams, coaching teams and management through initial implementation, grooming in-house talent, ensuring Agile values and principles are a focus, while acting as a navigator on the path to Agility. Hone emphasizes the inspect-and-adapt model where periodically the current state is reflected upon and opportunities for improvement identified and acted upon.

This book is geared toward Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Team members, product managers, project managers, middle, senior, and executive management in software engineering and development divisions and enterprises.  Learning opportunities include:

·         Comprehending Agile values and principles with an in-depth discussion on each principle and how they may be exemplified within an Agile culture.

·         Advocating a framework in which values, customer engagement, employee engagement, and an Agile framework can lead to an increase in sales and productivity, incorporated in the Agile Value to Incentive Differentiator (AVID) framework.

·         Presenting a methodical yet adaptable approach toward Agile transformation, encapsulated in a Ready–Implement–Coach–Hone (RICH) deployment model that can help establish an adaptable roadmap toward your Agile destination.   

·         Introducing the importance of an Agile Customer Validation Vision that emphasizes a disciplined approach to engaging customers and gaining their valuable customer feedback

·         Providing a mechanism for evaluating your level of alignment to the Agile values and principles, encapsulated in the Agile Mindset Values and Principles (Agile MVP) Advisor.

·         Promoting a special focus on value-added work (VAW) that features customer work as valuable and an accompanying value capture metric.

·         Introducing Gamification concepts to engage and motivate employees toward Agile behaviors with the goal of achieving an Agile transformation

·         Advocating a change in your IT governance toward collaborative governance and performance review process places a focus on team rewards. 

This book ends with three case studies—stories of a smaller colocated project, a medium distributed project, and a large distributed team—to help you understand how the readiness activities, deployment approach, and commitment to Agile lead to different results. This book can help you focus on truly “being Agile” and gain the business benefits of doing so.  What will your case study look like?  Let this material in Being Agile help you achieve a successful one.

In Agile, do not let “Fast” be your Driver

If your primary focus of using Agile is to build a product fast, then you may be missing the point of Agile.  Agile values and principles guides you to build the most valuable software based on the needs of the customer with high quality and in a timely manner.  Notice I did not use the word “fast” but instead I stated that it should be provided in a timely manner per the needs of the customers.  While building it fast can help you fail fast, "fast" should not be your primary drive and imply less focus on quality and adapting to the needs of the customer.  

Building the wrong thing fast is like driving a dragster that races off the motorway when the road twists and turns as they often do.  Instead an Agile racing car is like a Porsche Turbo that has great suspension, performance, quality engineering, and handling that can handle the twists and turns of the road.  The twists and turns represent the changes in customer requirements.  Also building a product fast with poor quality does not help the customer or your business in the long run. 

If you really strive to build customer value, then you need an Agile values and principles race car that will help you deliver what the customer wants, when they want it, with high quality.  If you can do this, then they will buy the product or more of the product, increasing the likelihood of remaining loyal to you, and helping you grow your business and they receive value.    

Do you bring the “Semper Fi” mindset to your Agile Teamwork?

When I think of a strong example of an Agile team, I recall teams that would help each other out, would watch each other’s back, and would focus on the project at hand, working strongly in a collaborative manner to achieve the common goal. 

Interestingly enough, this is what it takes to achieve the ideal Marine mindset.  Semper Fidelis is Latin for “always faithful” and has been the Marine motto since 1883.  This motto guides the Marine to remain focused on the mission at hand and stay focused on each other as part of the unit, as part of the team.  The intent is that once you commit and become a Marine, you transform to something new, something better, where you don’t worry about yourself.  Instead, you worry about the guy next to you and to the success of the mission.  You live a life with personal integrity, courage, determination, and commitment.  These are the same attributes that make a member of an Agile team successful. 

   

Another mindset within the Marine leadership is “to lead by example”.  In Agile, we don’t need people telling us what to do.  We need people who lead by example and who live the Agile mindset.  This is the best way for the team to absorb what is expected by the Agile values and principles and is another way to grow.  

If you want to learn about the importance of teamwork, spend a moment learning about the mindset of a Marine.  As I would illuminate the attendees of my numerous Agile workshops, one strong attribute of teamwork is “no one succeeds unless everyone succeeds.”  Agile team member should bring encouragement to each other, integrity to do what is right, courage to challenge the bad habits, and commitment to see the work through.  This is teamwork and beyond.