LeadingAgile’s Top 10 Field Notes of 2024
As 2024 draws to an end, like most of you, we’ve been busy taking inventory of how it went. We had some wins, some losses, and a TON of opportunities to learn and grow. Now, we turn our attention to 2025. In preparation, we’ve been pouring over this year’s data and we were curious to know what 2024’s top performing Field Notes were.
There were some posts that we totally expected to see in the list, and others that were a pleasant surprise. We thought it would be cool to round up all those Field Notes into one article and share the best of the best with you. Now, these aren’t our favorites, or the ones we really want you to see. These were voted on by you, our audience, with your time and attention. So without further ado, here’s LeadingAgile’s Top 10 Field Notes of 2024.
1. Overcoming the Obstacles to Cultural Change
Everyone wants a culture of agility, but culture must be balanced with the ability to produce results. In this talk, we explore how to systematically introduce organizational changes that can get people to think, feel, behave, AND deliver with agility.
Our Favorite Part
Dependencies are just absolutely everywhere. And dependencies to me are fundamentally what get in the way of creating the teaming strategies that give us really the agile secret sauce. Almost everything that we mess up in Agile is some form of capitulation to a dependency we can’t resolve. And once you see it through that lens, it’s hard to unsee. Once you see the world through this problem of dependencies, it’s like everything starts to light up as to why we can’t kind of create the organizations that we want to create.
2. Creating Safety for Your Finance Team
In this video, we’re exploring what it looks like to transform the way your company finances itself in a new, agile world. Many of our clients, as they shift toward an iterative and incremental delivery approach, realize that the old way of funding the business just isn’t cutting it anymore. Annual funding, long wait times for approvals, and all the red tape that goes along with that, aren’t as agile as the teams are.
Our Favorite Part
But you can’t just wave a magic wand and expect the finance team to forget everything they know and start trusting that you’ll deliver what you say you’re going to deliver based on just a wink and a handshake. There’s work that needs to be done to get them to see the value in a flexible funding model that can support the new agility your delivery teams possess.
3. Addressing the Hidden Cost of Outdated IT Systems
In this article, we take a look at how modernizing your IT infrastructure can streamline operations, spark innovation, and create a future where your technology won’t slow you down.
Our Favorite Part
Modernizing only IT systems without addressing the organizational problems that got the system in a bad state is only part of the problem. Reducing licensing costs without addressing the poor work-surface processes that are eating into profit margins leaves a large portion of the benefit unrealized. Moving a product into “the cloud” isn’t going to generate cost savings if its architecture isn’t modernized and it stays a monolith. If development team practices aren’t modernized and they are still using quality practices such as manual testing, manual deployments, and quarterly releases to production through a change approval board, the cost of feature delivery will remain expensive. Without addressing the organizational structure and how work flows across teams, dependencies between teams will continue to cause delays and slow down delivery.
4. Why Does Software Get More Complex Over Time?
In this article, we explore the reasons why software gets more complex over time and look at some of the attributes of software that’s soft and easy to change.
Our Favorite Part
Keeping software agile and easy to change involves addressing technical debt, implementing robust DevOps practices, and ensuring alignment between systems architecture and business needs. By focusing on value and continuously refactoring and testing code, organizations can achieve greater flexibility and efficiency in their software development.
5. Adopting Agile Isn’t About Adopting Agile
In this article, we explore why scaling agile requires participation from all levels of the organization, especially the c-suite, and why getting executives to participate in the transformation requires you to make a solid business case for agile.
Our Favorite Part
The reality is that agile is more than a way of working at the team level; to unleash its true potential, you must remove the things inside the organization that get in the way of agile. Your delivery teams will only be as agile as the dependencies and organizational impediments surrounding them will allow them to be. And while agile is excellent at breaking intra-team dependencies, what happens when the things getting in the way of agile are outside the teams’ sphere of influence?
6. Why Your Software Isn’t Soft and What You Can Do About It
Watch this to find out how we’re applying our change management techniques to cloud migration and app modernization to get companies like yours the benefits of moving to the cloud.
Our Favorite Part
The whole idea from the very beginning, the reason why they called it software, was because it was a lot easier to change that than hardware. And, in reality, that’s probably less true today than it was back then. The reality is the software, it’s brittle, it’s hazardous. You change it, and you don’t know what’s going to happen. You have a lot of complexity, you have a lot of headaches every time you want to change it, especially as software has grown up to the enterprise, it’s gotten more complex and scaled. And so the problem has become worse, the complexity, it doesn’t increase linearly with scale, it actually increases exponentially. So we’re just, as an industry, we’re really struggling with large complex software systems that are really difficult to change.
7. Why a Cloud Exit is a Step in the Wrong Direction
Is exiting the cloud a good financial decision? Or, is it a step in the wrong direction? After all, the reasons you moved to the cloud didn’t just go away.Instead of exiting the cloud, what if you addressed the root causes of excessive cloud spend and optimized your organization to get more of the benefits while spending less money?
Our Favorite Part
We believe that there is a path to realizing the benefits you expected when you began your cloud journey. The biggest factor is to break the problem into manageable chunks, each with its own business case and positive economics. We do this by developing an understanding of your business’ capabilities and the domains your applications and infrastructure are intended to serve. Then we can identify savings in three key areas: Optimizing Raw Infrastructure, Modernizing Applications, and Maturing Engineering Practices
8. Application Agility: Overcoming the Complexity Barrier
Successful app modernization approaches make informed decisions that connect technical changes to business value, and make software easier to maintain and adapt over time.
Our Favorite Part
Restoring application agility to legacy systems is both challenging and essential. By understanding our product structure, reworking system architecture, determining necessary refactoring, prioritizing remediation based on business value, and uplifting engineering practices, we can reverse the cycle of increasing complexity. This approach not only enhances the quality and reliability of our software but also supports long-term agility and growth. Successful application modernization is about making informed decisions that connect technical changes to business value, ultimately making our software easier to maintain and adapt over time.
9. Why Traditional Software Development Practices are Failing the Modern Enterprise
It’s time to move away from traditional software development practices and embrace methodologies that prioritize simplicity, safety, and continuous learning.This is how you empower teams to deliver software that’s ready to meet the needs of today AND adapt to whatever the future may bring.
Our Favorite Part
For executives and their teams, the implications of these issues are profound. The brittleness and complexity of their software directly translate into higher costs, slower delivery times, and increased risk. When changes are needed—whether to adapt to new business requirements, integrate with other systems, or scale to meet growing demand—their teams face a daunting task. Each change carries the risk of introducing new bugs or breaking existing functionality, leading to a cycle of firefighting that drains resources and stifles innovation.
10. Navigating the Challenges of Cloud Transformation
Cloud transformation isn’t just about adopting new technologies. It’s about strategically aligning those technologies to your business objectives, developing a rational way to modernizing your technical and data infrastructure, and using a human-centered change management approach to foster a culture of learning and adaptability.
Our Favorite Part
The journey of technical transformation requires a strategic focus on implementing the latest technologies, an iterative modernization of existing systems processes, and a way to integrate the technology into how you do business. Remember, the aim is not merely to adopt new technologies but to leverage them to align with your organization’s strategic objectives. This requires seeing the bigger picture, making informed decisions, modernizing systems, and fostering the ability to implement changes among your team. As you navigate this challenging yet rewarding journey, remember this isn’t a technology shift. You are steering your organization towards a sustainable, agile, and future-proof state. For business leaders like you, paving this path for your organization is the real challenge and opportunity.