By Christina Mumm and Janus Boye
Christina Mumm on stage at the Boye 19 Aarhus conference
Going agile at scale has been both buzz and reality in many large and complex organisations all over the world during the past decade. Whether you’re talking big or small scale, agile comes with many glorious promises.
We both recognise and advocate the benefits of agile. But in this post, we’ll also voice deep concern about what agile has become, and raise a few flags to be aware of, if you want to gain from the hard-earned learnings.
In our peer group meetings and conferences, we’ve heard about the agile reality several times. In a recent member conference call, Christina took a less travelled road within the topic of agile transformations: What's the dark side of our new organisational models, structures and ways of working? Specifically, she talked about how the industry maintains the “perpetual fantasies of the ivory towers and consultancy houses.”
Who are you to talk about the dark side of agile?
Christina has almost 2 decades of hands-on experience working in agile set-ups, most recently as an Agile Coach at Nuuday in Copenhagen. Together with 45 other Agile Coach colleagues, Christina hit the ground running in the Spring of 2020, helping implement Scandinavia’s biggest and most ambitious Enterprise agile transformation at Nuuday.
Nuuday is part of telco giant TDC, and is the largest digital service provider in Denmark. Spanning the entire Nuuday organisation - ie. not only IT - and impacting all 2.500 employees, this transformation is no ordinary feat.
In her experience, the pressure that these new ways of working add to our colleagues’ shoulders is downplayed. There is an assumption that everyone naturally masters (and enjoys) the full responsibility and self-management which agile brings in its wake. The concept of autonomous teams underpins most agile designs, but what does reality look like? Can teams be fully autonomous? Especially when the business is so big and complex? What do you need to be aware of when you do agile at scale?
Janus Boye has been leading a community of digital leaders since 2005 with group members in large, complex and global organisations and annual conferences in Denmark and the US.
Below are our shared notes from the call, improved with input from our digital project manager peer group and Christina’s further reflections after the call. Towards the end, you can also find the recording from the call, which was very Q&A-based. There were no slides.
Can agile be a problem?
Christina opened the call with the following:
It’s proven in many different cases that going agile makes a real difference both in terms of employee satisfaction as well as business value. Moreover, the richest benefits are achieved by organisations that successfully incorporate agile values and principles into their core culture. When you take a closer look, however, once the heyday of the honeymoon period is over, cracks start to show. Why is that?
According to Christina, the entire industry around agile is too overly optimistic and idealistic - almost even naive. How often have we heard consultants or internal evangelists proclaim: “go Agile, do Scrum, perhaps sprinkle it with a bit of Google Design Sprint - I’m telling you, all your problems will be solved!”
Could there be different reasons behind all the hype? Is it just about cashing in on the trend as long as it lasts, selling certifications and massive re-organisation projects under the pretext of becoming more efficient and improving the bottom line?
To set the stage for this member call and the discussion amongst the participants, Christina listed 3 central prerequisites for succeeding with an agile transformation. In her experience, although these are highlighted in all the ‘sales pitches’, they often end up being dropped between tables and ignored once reality kicks in:
End-to-end teams: These are a must if you want to experience the true value which working agile can bring. But true end-to-end teams are an extreme rarity in already existing organisations. In order to create them, it normally means that you need to design your organisation from scratch. It’s an uprooting of all existing structures which obviously implies massive consequences to the business for an unknown length of time. Even if you are lucky enough to have end-to-end teams, they won’t function perfectly without a lot of hard work and an environment that allows space and time to fail and learn from those mistakes.
Empowered and accountable teams: Teams are often held accountable, but very rarely empowered with the necessary mandate and budget to give them real decision-making power.
Skilled teams (continuous learning environment): In reality, there’s often a lack of necessary skills within the teams, as well as a lack of circumstances to actively do something about it.
The above three points should be the first challenges you make sure to address properly. If not, you will very quickly hit a dead-end.
The discussion that unfolded from here brought forward additional points:
When agile is introduced to a company, often only a few people there really understand what all the fuss is about. This can lead to great frustration amongst the majority of employees because the clear value-adds from working agile do not appear immediately. It takes time - something very few companies allow for.
Another challenge Christina mentioned in the call, is the risk of teams developing tunnel vision. You can experience teams within the same organisation delivering fragmented, disconnected products and services to the same customer. Be careful that the teams don’t close in on themselves, and only work towards their own objectives. They will then fail to impact the common, overarching goals of the company as a whole.
As you go through sprint after sprint, you might also encounter team members, who start feeling like workers on an assembly line. If you don’t put any effort into involving all team members in the full circle of why, what, how, and put a continuous effort into clarifying overall business goals, then teams will end up lacking the motivation to contribute and innovate.
Some employees might start asking: What’s in it for me? As another community member said, we are creatures of habit and people would rather stay with their local team or unit, even if the work is not interesting.
Similarly, some might ask: How does agile benefit the business? The standard yes-answer is that agile equals faster time-to-market, but - as we covered in a recent peer group meeting - that’s not always how it works. You should expect plenty of resistance to killing “backlog darlings” - even if you can prove they’re forcing you down the wrong path.
Another downside that many experiences are that agile is more demanding than the traditional ‘waterfall’ way of executing work. Not everyone likes to work with the uncertainty as well as full responsibility inherent to agile. Some people prefer to just follow a given plan, no matter how many revisions of the slide deck or how many failed big bang ‘go lives’ they suffer in the process. Ultimately, if no real value is created, it’s someone else’s call...
Companies that do agile transformations struggle tremendously with exactly that shift. The step away from a linear perspective and comfortable illusion of full control towards a more free-flowing, circular and iterative approach. In Christina’s opinion, this is one of the most underrated challenges in agile transformations. People are quick to pinpoint it and joke about it, but very rarely does anyone have the courage to tackle it when it hits them full on. Worst case, the consequence is a regression back to the previous structures that were bringing your company to a grinding halt.
There is always a tough transition period where the ‘status hungry’ command-control culture of old will battle ferociously with the more fluid, agile culture. The irony is that agile actually mitigates risk much better, and helps avoid unnecessary costs to a much higher degree than traditional frameworks do. But unfortunately, when people get their first burns from agile, they tend to fall back into old habits and seek the false security provided by control-dominated work structures.
In our conversation, it was also highlighted that agile can be very rigid too and does not automatically mean effective. Agile comes with many formalized meetings (‘ceremonies’). Too many for some of our members. But as Christina explained, the ceremonies are more often than not run in a wrong or misunderstood way, leading to fatigue and the type of ‘zombie agile’ that many have experienced by now.
Finally, our member Ivo Lukac from Netgen in Croatia also had a good point on the agency perspective: It’s tricky to do agile as an agency if the customer doesn’t get it. For long-term success, you’ll probably need to find a good way to merge your way of working with the customer’s
How to address these dark sides of agile?
In the call, Christina spoke about the necessity of being brave enough to challenge too formal, textbook implementations of agile. It’s not about blindly following the rules of a given framework. It’s about reducing complexity, mitigating risk, maximizing valuable outcomes, and re-learning how to work closely together with your colleagues and your customers. It’s crucial to maintain a sense of flexibility and pragmatism when embarking on fundamental changes to the way you work and organise yourselves in the company.
Also, you need to be resilient and persistent when you’re standing knee-deep in the difficult (and sometimes long) transition period as described above. One of our members pointed to Amazon Web Services for inspiration and their work on team autonomy and being able to flexibly move people around various teams.
A way forward, according to Christina, is to start breaking down our traditional understanding of roles and given structures - also the ones given by ‘agile’. This becomes a natural next step after you begin understanding the value that working agile can actually bring you. Christina advocates a much more fluid approach and one that maintains a radical outside-in view. We should mix and match a variety of methodologies and tools - agile, design thinking, lean start-up, etc. Team members should have the freedom to flow more freely in and out of their formal roles - don’t lock yourselves within the constraints of job labels like ‘Product Owner’, ‘UX’er’, ‘Backend developer’. And most importantly of all: It’s not about what you think, it’s about what your customer thinks and what the world around you looks like at any given moment of time.
As Christina also pointed out:
Going agile isn’t only something you do in an isolated part of your company, eg IT. If you want to remain relevant in the market, the transformation must happen on all levels and across your entire organisation, and you must be prepared to go all the way. As long as people continue to look at Business, IT, HR, Finance, etc as separate units, real change cannot happen.
She went on to explain that this is exactly what makes Nuuday’s agile transformation so ambitious - it is pushing the boundaries and challenging traditional ways of looking at what makes up an organisation. The first, bold steps have been taken, and as the company enters its second year of going agile, questions like the following are beginning to be voiced: Why are we even divided in the units we are today? Who should we be collaborating with across usual company divides in order to create more and better value for our customers?
It’s a tough journey, but also an exhilarating one, and definitely worthwhile.
Learn more about going enterprise agile
In the beginning of 2020, Nuuday went enterprise agile. Inspired by Spotify’s idea of being “loosely coupled yet tightly aligned”, the organisation consists of Tribes, Chapters and Squads - but also Managed Teams who are organised more traditionally, yet free to use any aspect of agile that makes sense in their context. Nuuday also introduced the OKR framework across the entire company to support the alignment and impact overall strategic goals.
Here is an article that highlights a part of it: How Finance Enables The Enterprise Agile Organization at Nuuday
This one is inspired by Dave Snowdens Cynefin framework and was shared at a peer group meeting. Agile works best for the complex quadrant
If you speak Danish, there’s a recommended podcast on the topic called: To agility and beyond.
Finally, you can also lean back and listen to the 31-minute call