Why Scrum Adoption alone isn't Enough for Business Agility, Pre, Post Covid and in the Post Digital Era

Golden Nuggets, Honest, Unbiased Thinking, Opinion, Entertaining Long Reads and Mini Guides of Practical, Pragmatic and Shared Know How from me as an Agile Practitioner to help you Accelerate your Journey towards Enterprise Agility.

Taking the Training Wheels off Scrum | Bigger Picture | Method Hacking | Culture First

As an Agile Practitioner, it frustrates me to watch organisations of all sizes, scale and complexity, across industries keep on “tinkering” and “wrangling” with proven Lean Agile Methods and Scaling Frameworks they have “adopted” or "transformed to".

What I mean by this is not taking a pragmatic path to implementation i.e. working towards a Lean Agile Method or Framework, but butchering them beyond being recognisable and then

Complain they don’t work,

Don’t deliver the benefits and

Agile goes against our company culture.

The latter is the subject of this article - Broken Company Culture and Fixed Mindsets.

I believe in a Shu Ha Rai, Kaizen – Continuous Learning and Improvement – as it’s a major part of not only Saying, but Doing and Being Agile, so before you go and “tinker” or “wrangle” with a proven Method or Framework that’s taken a lot of time, thought, research and development to bring to market, you need to not only Shu/Learn it, but Master it first in order to be able to Ha/Inspect and Adapt or Rai/Evolve it to something new - Just like Bruce Lee did to create Wing Chun, an improved martial art drawing from multiple other disciplines.

Big Data is still a buzz word, however, most Management and Leadership teams still don’t know how to harness it to be Data Driven in their Decision Making or Product and Service Design, instead preferring the old arts of judgement, instinct, closed door conversations and we’ve always done it this way, so like Agile, complain that it doesn’t provide any ROI.

Big Data is more than Visualisations and Social Media

The Menacing and Problematic Issue for Agility

Underneath all of this is a far more menacing and problematic issue for agility.

Traditional Management and Leadership Culture and Practice.

Nothing new to the majority of us, but why still don’t Managers, Leaders and Executives get it?.

There is enough material and research out there on all things Agile...Mindset, Leadership, Culture to Ways of Working...to prove its a better way for almost everyone.

Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast and Technology for Lunch

No amount of “tinkering” or “wrangling” with Scrum, Lean 6 sigma, LeSS, SAFe or whatever your chosen approach is, is going to make a real impact or big enough difference if your Leadership and Management is broken and stuck in the theory of the 1900s preventing a shift to modern culture of Innovation, Servant Leadership and Agility.

It Appears Scrum and DevOps Fixes Everything in Agile – Right?

Scrum if practiced well, will help “teams” improve their project/product leadership via the process, controls, events, ceremonies, artefacts and new roles if “followed”.

Scaling it with LeSS/Less Huge, Nexus, S@S etc may also increase short term, team or programme performance, like putting in a “DevOps Team”(hint - there is no such thing) and Tools feels like a sexy , tangible quick win, but even more quickly comes stumbling down to a halt when there is no product thinking/mindset or companywide product practice behind it, and Continuous Development and Deployment drags it backside because there is no pipeline of new stuff going out to create/produce value via the product owners/managers of the value streams and feedback loops that should be in place from the Big Data and the capability to Release on Demand but are so often missing.

Despite the “Quick Wins”, “Profitable Implementations” many businesses are still saying their Agile, DevOps and Cloud Adoptions or Transformations after the first, second and third attempts are still failing them! and they aren’t seeing the growth, development or performance gains in their Business Agility Pillars or a ROI from the business cases for. Surprised not really, Frustrated by the cowboys and girls, yes.

Agile is My Mindset, DevOps is My Culture

Just imagine, if this were the case, I wouldn’t be writing this.

The problem lies in the old theories of management and leadership taught in business schools, master’s programmes and old skool TV programmes like “The Apprentice”. the shouty hierarchical command and control, blame the person not the system they epitomise as so called good business practice.

Adoptions and Transformations are still run, governed and treated by PMOs and Business Sponsors/Owners as “projects”, short, start stop interventions that change the short term game/make them some money that quarter etc.

A core tenant of Business Agility, Agile and DevOps Cultures is that you never have to “transform” again because your organisation can continually Learn, Adapt and Evolve to market and customer conditions. aka the VUCA or Disruption.

This is where we separate the Methods from the Frameworks and the Cultures/Movements behind them that are poorly understood by Traditional Managers, Leaders and probably the Cowboys and Girls.

All is Not What it Seems!

Scrum, is a method, a process to change the project leadership dynamics despite its recent rebranding as a framework to keep it on trend, monetised. Don’t get me wrong, I am not a hater, in fact the opposite, I like Scrum a lot and all its flavours e.g. Scrumban, Scrum XP etc.

S@S, Nexus/SPS, LeSS all take Scrum as their basis to evolve or scale it. What do they scale, the process and roles? Is there a hope that the new roles and their responsibilities may change behaviours, does grooming your backlog using INVEST, DEEP and When- Get -Then prevent the garbage in - garbage out scenario like mastering Data using MDMDM. Yes, but too many Managers and Leaders looking for cost efficiency don’t understand the Method, so they skip it, stop Daily Stand Ups for 2 weekly ones, only use a Definition of Done and no Definition of Ready and wonder why Features take two more sprints to “perfect” or "course correct" to expectations when no Acceptance Criteria where set as Complimentary Technical Practices were overlooked. Sure its part of Agile to incrementally improve things, but you need Goals and Product/Service Ownership to steer you.

You can master Scrum or any other Method or Framework, but what will stop, limit or constrain benefits being realised is Leadership and Management Culture and the lack of Systems, Design and Product Thinking from this group and Complimentary Practices that really elevate the Methods/Frameworks in real life.

What Is and Does Agile Culture Feel like Then?

We all hear about Digital Native Culture, Agile or DevOps Culture, and many successful teams and programmes can and do live and breath it, but the Middle, Senior and Executive levels don’t along with other business functions like HR, Finance or Procurement.

How many Project Managers have been made Scrum Masters?

How many Programme Managers have been made Product Owners?

How many Product Owners or Change Managers have been made Release Train Engineers?

I can think of many roles that "tinkerers" and "wranglers" have changed because they think they are the same or similar roles, with the same purpose and intent, only to be oh so wrong. This is one of the first Anti Patterns you’ll see were your Culture Development is going wrong and is probably linked to your PMO function and old skool L&M.

The Agile Mindset stems from the Agile Manifesto itself. Before that, the House of Lean. After Those SAFe Principles, but, they all have purposeful commonality. To change behaviour. Not to be all flowerery and touchy feely, but with the intent to change what was broken with traditional project management and leadership and evolve it to a higher, better place, except its those things that are failing us by the “tinkerers” and wranglers” removing the very things that change patterns of practice, thinking and behaviours that make Agile, DevOps and Business Agility what it powerfully is.

Its not about Saying or Doing Agile but Being Agile

Lets look at the Agile Mindset quickly seeing its the core of this article.

Being Agile starts with the 4 Values of the Agile Manifesto – I am not going to tell or show you them – inspect them here and bookmark this page

Behind those 4 Values, we have 12 Principles, which to this day, still stand, despite the fact we have pivoted to products and services and projects are banned word in the Agile Mindset and Vocabulary.

The there is the Trust Equation which ignites collaboration, innovation and Agility.

Then there are the many complimentary practices Value Engineering, Lean Portfolio Management, ITIL/COBIT, TOGAF, DDD, Test Driven Development, Backlog Grooming, Clay, Paper, 3D Printing Prototyping/LoFi and HiFi Modelling, Design Sprints/Spikes, Eyeball Tracking for UXD, that allow us to bring the Values and Principles to life via our Agile Mindset as Agile Culture.

To be Agile, you must not only do the process, you must go beyond the logical left brain into the higher creative and emotional right brain and have high levels of EI, MI to go with the BI.

So we cant improve on scientific left brain traditional process management, lets compare Traditional to Agile Ways of Working

Traditional is

• Highly Detailed, 36 month Ghant Charts with WBS vs Mission Driven Goal and Feature Based Roadmaps
• Big Bang/All or Nothing Launch vs Early and Often Iterative or Incremental Releases of Value
• Lengthy Meetings vs 15mins Scrums/DSUs, Offline Follow Ups and 45 - 90min Retros and Product Reviews
• Power holding, bureaucratic CRs, DAs, CABs and Steer Co's vs Co-creation Huddles/Scrumbles, Swarms, Hacks and Sprints
• Fixed Scope, Cost and Time vs Built in Quality, Flexible Scope, Fixed Resources and Lifecyle Management to realise value
• Right First Time Upfront vs Wrong First Time (TDD/BDD)
• Risk Averse/Failure Avoidance vs Fail Fast, Fail Forward, Test and Learn So We Know What we Don't Know as well as What We Do Know
• Stop/Start/Gates/Phases vs Continuous Feedback, Learning, Reviews, Measurement Retros and Continuous Improvement
• Command and Control PPM vs Decentralised, Empowered Self Governing, Self Organising, Sensing, Responding and Adapting Long Lived Teams
• Do by Thinking vs Doing, Seeing, Learning and Adapting
• Papers, Logs, Presentations and Meetings vs Cards, Conversation, Communication, Collaboration, Wiki’s, Repo's and Artefacts

As Leaders and Managers, use this as a Check List and do A Gemba Walk and Go See what’s happening at your coal face by observing, listening and carefully using open and closed questioning to peel back the surface of "activity" to see what people are "Being"

You don’t have to have Post It notes stuck everywhere, but seeing team whiteboards and collaboration tools used is at least a positive step to the Visual Thinking Agile Cultures display.

So there is a massive difference in Saying your Agile to Doing and Being Agile and it should be part of your Growth and Measurement Strategy so that an Agile Growth Mindset is embedded in your culture and you might want to use other strategies like M&A to bring Digital Native/Cloud/Agile and DevOps culture in,

Triple, Quadruple the Effort on Lean Agile DevOps Mindset Development

When you develop your Change and Transformation Strategy – spend triple or even quadruple the time and effort on culture and systems change.

Scrum improves project leadership and collaboration over poorly executed command and control waterfall, but it doesn’t have the emphasis or impact on the wider complimentary practices up, down, sideways and all around that significantly and holistically change organisational design and culture towards agility. Scrum fans will not doubt debate this, but if they critically evaluate Scrum, they too will see the limitations and constraints they should be aware of instead of making a one size fits all solution to Agility.

As well as making the “Pivot from Project to Product”, you need to change your Business and Enterprise Architecture and overlay your customer focused, data driven, product and service development and value delivery approaches, not sticky plaster it with a one size fits single solution. In SAFe Terms, Change and Transformation is a Large Solution with multiple Trains.

Stop Undoing the Good Stuff

The more you buy off the shelf COTS tools and do less building, the better off you’ll be. When you customise tools, your unconscious bias will kick in and you’ll just take out the good stuff and replace it with how you're working now, defeating the purpose of Agile tools and the way they are designed to work for a reason. Unlearn and Adapt.

Take a Wider, Broader, Up and Downstream Approach

Before you select your Agile Method or Framework – learn about Lean and Systems Thinking.

Both are heavily embedded into many Lean Agile Methods, Frameworks and Complimentary Disciplines, but if you do not know what it is, you’ll miss it and if you are one of the “tinkerer’s” and adapt the Method/Framework trying to be “agnostic” or “innovative in creating your own”, what I commonly see, hear and you’ll likely do, is exclude all the behaviour change benefits because you’re Agile Mastery – a combination of Skills, Knowledge, Understanding and Practice through Experience are at the pre-crawl or crawl level instead of running. We all have our boundaries, so rather than complain Agile isn’t working, seek Master Practitioner and Community of Practice help and support and not just Scrum “method process” Masters to co-create and collaborate with as Agile is much much more than this limited view,

Like Project Managers aren’t usually good Scrum Masters (there’s exceptions), Scrum Master aren’t Agile or Enterprise Agile Coaches who can step back and take a wider skillset, approach, and practice and shape and lead your change and transformative efforts and activities. Every role has some coaching to it, like every job has an aspect of project management, but this doesn’t make you the right role holder or person.

Another example is Kotter’s work. It is readily indefinable in SAFe along with ITIL, ZBB and Beyond Budgeting Values, Principles and Practice. You won’t find it in Scrum like Scrum won’t show you how to speed up product or service delivery through a DevOps Culture and CDRA pipelines either. So first look deeper underneath, learn the beautiful basics to avoid the quick wins of tools, methods, fast framework adoption and working with shifting sands as Leaders and Managers in context to your Business Agility Heatmap, Health Radars, Maturity Index, Situation Analysis or Adoption Roadmaps to avoid costly anti patterns and low EVM. Agile works but for a reason!

Helping build Perspectives ready to Create and Build Agile Culture as a Mindset

They once said, ff you want something Fast, Cheap and of good Quality, that’s impossible, is it Though? Agile and DevOps cultures and Modern Technologies can achieve this, but you have to change your patterns of thinking and your profit margins to create customer value.

A lot has been done on Innovation and Innovation Management, but few Leaders and Managers learn any of these skills, let alone practice them.

So to help change the 1900s theory into something more practical for the 4th Industrial Revolution, the Digital Age, the Age of Disruption, the age where constant change is the new normal, then I encourage you to look at Systems Thinking – yes like Design Thinking, a1970s concept, along with more modern Management Theories and Practices like:

Management 3.0 to help middle – executive level managers Practice their Trade Very Differently for     knowledge workers and the gamified/social and digital world.

Learning from the Back of the Room – a set of Experiential Training, Facilitation, Mentoring and Coaching Skills on how to uplift and motivate your Talent Development in Shaping your Agile Culture

Enterprise Social Systems (ESS)  - to put a new lense on Creating Business Value, relevant Information Flows, Learning, the way Work is Made Visible, how the Blocks are Managed and how a Decrease in Organisational Processes and Complexity will help build an exponentially better company.

Social Economic Approach to Management, (SEAM) - to help you put a lens on Accounting and Humans over Profit and Expose the Hidden Costs of just chasing profits and provide new perspectives on how to Balance Profit with Purpose, Vision, Mission and Agility, not just the spiralling dysfunction caused by cost optimisation approaches to organisational change and transformation.

Testing Business Ideas and the Invincible Company – Books, Canvas’s and Models that will Change the Way you Think, See, Operate and Do business that drive Agile Culture by Doing Agile – Not just Scrum process.

This background will help you better understand what Lean Agile Leadership and Culture really means and where it comes from in shaping your organisations Business Agility, Adoption Journey and Strategy Roadmaps and just perhaps, put you on a Shu Ha Rai and Kaizen Journey. Enlightenment my Friend.

Robot Wars, IoT and Smart Things

AI, ML, RPA and Smart This and That.

AI and ML will become a life savers in Bio Medicines and Bio Technology, allowing personalised drug treatments for alignments and diseases.

RPA frees up repetitive and labours tasks t focus human on higher value work - thinking, innovating, solving problems and communicating.

AR, VR, Mixed Reality - can help engineers diagnose and fix technical faults on airplanes, ships and other big plant and machinery and supply real time instructions, spare part numbers to immersing people into safe virtual environments out of harms way - think modern warfare, drones and 3D fighter pilot helmets.

IoT can save waste, speed supply chains, increase food production and many other potentially beneficial things, but just collecting personal data isn't a justified use case.

Whilst these are great use cases for BoTs, AI and Advanced Tech, most use case are exploitation i.e. Conversational AI replacing Receptionists and Knowledgeable First Responders, Front Line Services or Customer Care Centres.

Chat BoTs faking real human interaction and committing cybercrime.

AI and ML exploiting buying options through false representation of rating, reviews, price falls/drops.

Big Data and Neural Networks knowing more about you than you.

Machines replacing humans in what some call low paid, unskilled work, or self - checkouts made out to speed up your busy life, but how many times do you wait for the security cap or some clearance to be done by a human.

These things don't actually create Agility, its the opposite - they lack the human centred approaches needed, they lack ethics, real interaction - not cyber physical, lack regulation and the people behind them in certain roles, industries and sectors, lack the morale fabric because they do not understand the technologies and the unintended and intended consequences, therefore if not super well thought out, these become anti patterns of Business Agility because they just shift the issues elsewhere and not solve the customer, market, societal and environmental pain points, needs, wants and desires.

Technology is great, but like social media, when they exploit data, are free and you become the product, we must be more wary than the marketing hype and that this is another must have Smart thing.

So Scrum alone, isn't going to provide the guardrails, scrutiny and controls we need to blend advanced technology into advanced modern life as its just an accelerated product delivery process that managers grab, to push things out faster and faster without apply any form of systems thinking, just commercial thinking, so automated governance needs to be balanced correctly in DevOps or Production Pipelines with human intervention/control or governance and oversight.

Summary, it all Starts and Finishes with Resetting L&M Culture

Change is Hard, Transformation even Harder,

It’s a well informed and guided journey, not a stop start effort and to succeed with and Agile, DevOps, Cloud or Business Agility initiative, first you must reset your Leadership and Management Practice, not just your teams.

If you truly want to stop transformations and become more of a constantly learning, evolving, adaptable, ethical and responsive organisation to markets and consumers, then the biggest change needs to come from Leadership and Management, without it, shift won’t happen, your belief systems will be out of kilter and you’ll be paddling upstream without a paddle and forever chasing your tail.

Oh yeah, stop the “tinkering”, “wrangling” and I know "hacking" is cool word, with stuff until you’re on your way to being a Master - only then do you have the depth and breadth of experience, the knowledge, the understanding to Bruce Lee it, smash it...