Technical debt, one of the key drivers of slow delivery, is rarely understood by non-technical business people. Even rarer are companies who have a strategy for investing in its reduction, which has been jointly agreed to by both business and technology groups. Debt is viewed as a problem for technology to address, not a systemic issue. Unfortunately, this leads to longer cycle times, higher costs, and lengthy time-to-market. The DevOps focus on continuous improvement is displaced by behavior that leads to continuous worsening. For companies to improve, the reduction of technical debt must be understood and addressed as a systemic issue.

The Business Case for Business Agility

Cliché or Real? The world is changing around us at a faster and faster pace. Companies we hadn't even heard of a decade ago have become the centerpiece of our daily lives. The decadent luxury of one generation has become the standard of the next. Consumers and businesses alike now favor pay-per-use and “try before you buy” options. Information and services of yesteryear are now available on our Smartphones for the cost of just a few clicks or the “ad-free version” for a few dollars a month.

It probably comes as no surprise that there’s a massive demand for DevOps and Agile development skills in the marketplace. Based upon the 2018 IT Priorities Survey conducted by TechTarget, Agile development methods and DevOps are top priorities for IT organizations that must fuel their digital businesses.

Part Two: Three Transformative Truths Essential to Success

Part One: Transformation as Rubber Band or Brave New World?

During a recent Agile coaching engagement I overheard this comment: "Agile isn't a big thing." This viewpoint was clearly negative, as in: "Agile isn't any different than anything else." To provide context around this comment, it was mentioned in relationship to the scope of an Agile Transformation in its pilot stage; this is the part of a transformation where we work to share the vision and provide a limited set of people in an organization with the knowledge, tools, and experiences to become change leaders.

The Need for Business Agility

A shortcoming of most Agile transformations is that they do not go far enough when implementing Agile within an organization. They tend to solely focus on the IT side of the organizational equation without addressing the business side of the equation. IT transformations allow organizations to become more efficient and effective at delivery value once that value has been defined. Once something has entered the organization’s internal system, it can then be processed quickly. A colleague of mine refers to this form of optimization as ‘internal optimization.’

In Part 1 of this series, we addressed the value that Agile delivers in terms of the change in working capital from which many companies can benefit. In this post, we turn our attention to another key factor that CFOs must consider when evaluating Agility and its impact for the business related to de-risking the income stream and standing by the organization's fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders.

Here's a scenario you might have encountered.

You are with a large enterprise and your team believes strongly that an Agile Transformation will have a major impact for the organization that will result in greatly improved efficiency and faster time to market. You start from the bottom up; the effort is heavily supported by a few key stakeholders and team members and you make progress. But somewhere along the line, the Project Management Office (PMO) jumps in and attempts to measure results using traditional metrics that do not illustrate the true value of the transformation. So things unfortunately fall apart, or more likely are crushed.  And maybe your organization tries again but after the second false start, the support for the transformation begins to melt away.

For those who aren't familiar with decision fatigue, it’s a condition where your ability to make decisions deteriorates with the number of decisions you make after a rest period (think nightly sleep). One of the most iconic counters to decision fatigue was Steve Jobs' seldom changing wardrobe. The number of decisions we make in a day is really staggering. And the impact of making the wrong one can vary from insignificant ("Should I wear the sand chinos or the tan chinos today?") to traumatic ("Can I make the crossing before the train gets here?").

Agile. Delivery of business value incrementally with a minimal amount of development work-in-progress (inventory) with such a short cycle time between plan and delivery that changes in market, technology, and legislation are immediately responded to with near zero “excess,” near zero “obsolescence,” and less “working capital” (cash) needed to keep the engineering machine running.

Agile transformations present significant stress to organizations. Much of this stress is derived from the realization that team members are expected to complete all of the tasks required by their legacy culture PLUS the new behaviors a successful Agile Transformation requires. And, we should be clear: Agile Transformations require new practices, techniques and events, all of which need to be learned, practiced and applied. And the time, effort, and energy required must come from somewhere. It is the proverbial 10 pounds of material in a 5 pound bag problem. It never fits and it is not Agile, because team members cannot sustain that pace indefinitely.

The million dollar question every software developer asks themselves is:

Software is strategic differentiator for companies and the ability to design and deliver this software effectively and efficiently is dependent upon agility. Back in the 1990’s companies started considering how they could deliver software more efficiently which launched the Agile Movement. And starting in 2010, we began to see large scale agile transformations - “Agile at Scale.”