Creating A Solid Foundation For Agility

Mike Cottmeyer explains why team-level Agility is the first step to achieving business-level Agility.

Learn more by watching the Base Patterns of Business Agility on-demand webinar series here

Transcript

Well, what agile gives me the ability to do, is it gives me the ability to have a backlog that is written in such way that makes it really, really easy to change and really easy to negotiate scope and manage trade-offs. When I have a velocity of a, of a dedicated team and I understand the throughput of that team, I can start to use that as a predictive indicator of the amount of backlog that I’m going to be able to get through. And then, because I know that I’m getting to a working tested increment of product that meets the definition of done, right. I actually have a very clear understanding that as I build things, I’m not accumulating a bunch of technical data, or a bunch of partially done work, or a bunch of defects or anything like that, right. And so, and so, again, a lot of agile we’ve thrown away, this idea of planning but what we need to do is we need to think about the nature of the plans, how we build plans, how we build teams, how we get to a definition of done. And then when things change, we have a really solid foundation to pivot and to learn and to make changes to the plan and to the baseline and things like that, okay. And so, so that’s where the three things story came in, okay. The challenge is, is that how do we get the methodology to work in congruence with the organizational structure, governance and metrics so that the practices in the structure work together and allow the culture to emerge? Okay. And so that’s what we’re building, but at the root right at the, at the lowest level, it’s the team. Okay. So team level agility is not sufficient for enterprise agility or organizational agility, but it’s a necessary precondition for organizational agility and enterprise agility. And when you go in and you’re talking to executives in these really, really large companies, it’s, it’s really a tough challenge because, because it’s like what I just said team level agility is necessary, but it’s not sufficient. And when soon as you start talking about team level agility, people wanna go to, well, I’m, I’m really concerned about business agility and I’m concerned about business agility too. But if you don’t have delivery level agility it’s really difficult to get the organizational agility because all these things you wanna pivot and adapt to a market, if your organizational structure in your system delivery isn’t in alignment to be able to inspect and adapt and respond, then it’s really difficult to get the business to be able to exploit that capacity in a way that gets what it needs in market.