Don't get hung up on ‘Business Agility’ too much

To quote a currently very popular insight:

“As long as you don’t have your Business Layer under control, it doesn’t matter how agile your teams are.”

And YES, there is some truth in that. But it can turn out to be a logical fallacy.

And that is where I have my beef with the lure of ‘Business Agility’, because a lot of people think, that it is enough to focus on that level now. Not in my experience.

Having the awareness is –as the mathematicians would probably say– necessary but not sufficient.

An organisation is a system of interconnected systems (or services to use the terminology from the Kanban method) and if these underlying systems don’t work then all the ‘business level coordination awareness’ in the world won’t change much about the delivery capability of your organisation.

You can invest as much as you want into power steering (Servolenkung in German) and slip control – as long as your car is sliding sideways on an ice slope with slicks for tyres it actually pays to invest into better tyres before you start fiddling with the higher level elements.

As long as your business analysts don’t know how to quantify a business value, your engineers don’t know how to reliably ship the product, your sales people don’t know about the capabilities of your delivery services (sometimes a.k.a. development teams), or –in short– your teams are still at a low ‘agile’ maturity you won’t be able to steer the business.

The bottom line is:

As long, as your team level maturity is too low, you can improve the business level as much as you want – it won’t make a difference.

Therefore:

The maturity of an organization has to be evolved as a whole. The evolution at team-level, business level and strategic level has to go hand in hand

till next time
  Michael Mahlberg

P.S.: But if you focus on Business Agility alone at least some people in the organization will feel good. For about six to twelve release-cycles. Because –in my experience– that’s how long it usually takes the organization to come to this realization. [That can be up to three years btw...]

Let MoSCoW help you with facilitation and workshop design ;-)

Interactivity vs. Schedule

When designing a workshop –or any session– you facilitate one crucial aspect is timing. But timing gets complicated when you have lots of interactive parts in the session in question. And we know from research about training and oftentimes also from personal experience, that interactive elements are essential to successful sessions, so there is a serious incentive to include interactive stuff. The same holds true for other kinds of meetings as well – from design sessions to board meetings.

Balancing being on time an interactivity with MoSCoW

There is an old idea, made popular in the early days of agile by its extensive use in DSDM called MoSCoW. The capital letters in MoSCoW stand for Must Should Could Won’t and the «o»s are just there to make it sound nice. Without looking into the original priotization method too deeply, thinking about the design of a session in therm of MoSCoW categories helps a lot in balancing timeliness and interactivity. Especially if you combine the MoSCoW thinking with the concept of Heijunka or work (load) leveling.

Designing the session

In most sessions, especially in teaching, it is not a good idea to have all the musts at the beginning – because of the way people learn a schedule should not be a backlog where you put all the important stuff up front and the rest at the end anyway. The approach that I have seen to be usefull to a lot of facilitators, is to make shure that your schedule consists of a well balanced mix of must, should and could elements. What ‘well balanced’ means depends on the circumstances of course. Assuming we’re in a training situation and we know only very little about your audience, we might want to include more ‘could’ elements than we do when we’re working in a well known setting. This is the Heijunka part – heijunka literally means ‘leveling’, but in the context of lean the meaning is extended to something like ‘smart leveling.’

BTW: In meetings that need to have decisions at the end, one of the must items –come to decisions– needs to be at the end. So it’s a very good idea to have discardable parts in the schedule even if the sessions you’re facilitating is not a training.

Applying triage as you go

Now while we run the session we don‘t want to constantly check the clock to see if we’re either too fast or too slow. Quite to the contrary. We do look at the time often, but we use our projected agenda (including the MoSCoW classifications) to adjust as we go. When we’re ahead of the time (e.g. because the audience is faster than expeted) we can transport a bit more information and include the could element that we put in our internal agenda. Should we be slower than planned we cut one of the should elements. By using this approach it is way easier to keep the value for the participants high for the whole session. (As opposed to lumping all the unimportant stuff at the end, so that we also could skip it – as we would do it in a prioritized backlog apporach.]

Just give it a try...

till next time
  Michael Mahlberg