Importance of Environment in an Agile Transformation

I attended today a SAFe 4.0 event arranged by a Finnish training company called Nitor Delta. As a guest speaker they Michael Stump from the Scaled Agile Inc. The event was also a good meeting place for SAFe practitioners. I must say that I saw quite a few familiar faces. And met many new people who I can hopefully later exchange experiences with.

After writing a case study, my company has drawn a lot of attention from other (potential) SAFe adopters. I have a bit mixed feelings about it. Of course I'm happy and proud about the attention, but being a Finn, it's difficult to handle the situation. And then again, since I see all the daily difficulties we deal with, I sometimes feel tempted to say "..but we still face these difficulties". But maybe there's no need. I guess everyone understands that things are in reality much more complex than in theory.

From http://finnishnightmares.blogspot.fi

But from the conversations that I participated after Michael had finished his presentation I learned that environment matters a great deal in SAFe/Agile adoptions and transformations. First I was somewhat against the idea of training everyone at the beginning of the adoption process, but maybe my first impression fails me there. In some cases I think even training is not enough, but some people should get their brains totally rewired. I mean, if you have done something in the same way for decades (or even years), it could be overwhelming to modify your daily routines.

If I think about possible factors why the transformation was successful in our case, I could easily list at least a few. There was a big management support. Previous and current heads of R&D were supportive for the idea and also the Chief Quality Officer. I think also the CEO saw potential in the new practices.

We had already been trained in Scrum when the big organizational change was initiated. All developers had received training in Scrum essentials and every Scrum Master and Product Owner was certified. Scrum Master and tester Communities of Practice were also formed right at the start. So good practices had distribution channels.

Release Process was established even though at first we didn't plan the releases. But the decision to shorten the release cycle was made. Release Manager, a person who would facilitate the release planning and execution was also appointed right away.

Then I think a big deal of the change can be credited to a couple of champions. People who were in key roles (RTE, Owner of Software Development Process, Chief Portfolio Officer, line management of R&D) made big contributions. Having a vision of how things could be done was important, but just as important was the support from these champions. And finally the support and engagement of employees. Everyone wasn't eager to embrace the change at first, but enough many were.

During the conversations with other companies I have realized that there are other, more subtle things that supported the transformation. Some that I had never even thought of since they are rooted so deep in the culture and operations. The organization is not flat, but there are exceptionally good possibilities to access information, suggest new ideas and to participate in the decision making. Also the developers are treated as experts. And there's one company value that I hold in the highest respect: Enjoy Working Together.

In the development money is not an issue. I mean, there's no unlimited budget, but people in development get to fully concentrate on the contents. If something is considered worth doing and there's clear potential, it will be done. There's no sharing of the blanket between different business units. (I have never needed to worry about CapEx or OpEx.)

As a conclusion, I think there were quite a few things that made the transformation possible. Some are such that people living inside the system do not even perceive. In a way I'd be tempted to say they don't realize how lucky they are. So let me conclude my post with a few pictures.

Office Breakfast

Foosball table

Hackathon trophy

Software Development - More Than Coding

Think about software development. I'm assuming you have an image of someone writing code in your mind. Well software development is that, also. But it's also much, much more.

In my company I'm responsible for the software development in this more broader sense. When I think about software development, everything begins from the customers. Developing software is solving customers' problems. Selecting what problems to tackle as a company is a strategic choice. Strategy narrows down what you develop and helps the company focus. Probably it also states in which markets you want to compete in.

Strategy helps the company define it's portfolio. What customer problems we want to solve and what kind of solutions we offer? The solutions can be products or services. Strategy should guide you in this. If it doesn't, refine the strategy.

Let's now assume that in your offering/portfolio you have product(s). Each product should have a vision. What the product will be in the future? What customer problems will it solve when it will be in it's ultimate, final form. (This form will never see the daylight. Vision serves as a distant goal, something to strive for. It's an idealisation that will be even more magnificent when you get closer.)

Vision will help you define a roadmap. Where as vision can be hazy, the roadmap should be really concrete and tangible. I think of roadmap as a guidebook for the next steps toward the vision. If your strategy is planned for the next 5-10 years, roadmap could cover maybe 3 years. It's worth noting that it's still a high level plan and as for any agile plan, subject to changes.

In software development roadmap is implemented in releases of new software versions. They are usually developed in iterative and incremental fashion. Old functionality is modified and improved with new features and bugs and defects are fixed. Many times companies try to shorten their release cycle. The ultimate case would be Continuous Deployment where every change would be deployed to customers. But this is very much industry specific. In some cases the overhead of taking new software version into use is so big that customers don't want to do that often. Then it's practical to select a release cycle that suits both the company and the customers.

In agile development, software is usually created by small teams in an iterative fashion. The length of these iterations or sprints is usually limited to less than a month, a little bit depending on the selected methodology. Sprints are like mini-projects; they are planned, executed and in the end there are sessions for examining the results and for learning from the experience. ...and then cycle starts over again.

Daily work in sprints is carried out by the development team. Developers are experts in their field and select the most fitting methods for the implementation. They have the authority for carrying out daily decisions.

We got to the part where the coder writes source code. But as there are many layers in onion, there are many layers in software development. Writing the code is just one of them. Never the less, it's an important craft if the software is to be of any use and even more so if it is to be maintained.

Slack & Blink

I read Tom DeMarco's Slack and it made me question my own role as a process owner. The whole book seems to be somewhat manifesto against the sort of 'efficiency' that targets keeping everyone busy and also for management by objectives. The second one has been criticized ever since W. Edgar Deming, who I most relate with systems thinking.

In the end, Slack isn't against efficiency. At least that's my interpretation. It tries to make a separation between making individual parts (seem) efficient (busy) versus making the overall system efficient. I guess the lean approach would anyway consist of having enough slack to keep the flow smooth.

Another topic Slack points out is the culture of fear and how it can effectively prevent organizational learning. In a culture of fear organization you can not take time to learn new things. You always need to be efficient and busy. Inevitably this will keep people in their comfort zones because taking the time to try new things is just too risky. To transform such organization into a learning one you would first need to make people feel safe, cut off internal competition (between units or other silos) and give people enough slack for deliberate slower-than-expert training.

Slack got me thinking about process development. Just to keep in mind that busyness and effective value delivery are two very separate things. I sure hope it stays clear to me. Reminder from time to time doesn't hurt.


After Slack I started reading Malcolm Gladwell's Blink - The Power of Thinking without Thinking. It concentrates on our first impressions and thinking that we do unconsciously. I think it's very much related to Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. (Now I realize that Gladwell wrote Blink six years before the other book. I just read them in reverse chronological order.) I analyzed Kahneman's book in my previous blog posts (here, here and here). Blink also supports the idea that we operate a big part of our day on an autopilot. Many of our choices are just too import to be left for our overanalyzing conscieousness. Instead they are made more efficiently, unconsciously.

Interestingly, we cannot tell how we end up with our unconscious choices. They happen 'behind closed door'. There are many studies that indicate that we don't have a clue. We can say we like this brand more than that, but usually the reasons are not known to us. And the setup of the experiment also matters. In short sipping test Pepsi usually wins Coke. But when you drink a whole bottle at home, you might change your selection. Or artist that you don't necessarily like after hearing a short sample might still be a huge success live.

Both books have been really enjoyable and worth reading. I can easily recommend both of them.