Number 5 on our countdown of the Top 10 Agile Success Factors deals with organizational change during Agile adoption.  As an external coach and trainer, I stand around in airports a lot.  I imagine we all have a story about the worst airport in the world.  The worst airport I regularly frequent is Denver International Airport.  The airport itself, to be fair, is a nice space.  The common area is open and airy, and although it is a largish airport, I never feel overwhelmed by crowds there.

Except for when I’m standing in the airport security line.

You’ve seen these lines at every airport.  The airport security experience is divided into two areas: waiting in line to show your ID/boarding pass and standing in line to be examined by metal detectors/x-ray machines.  Last trip out of Denver, I found myself in a line that was moving surprisingly quickly.  We all trundled through the maze of cordon ropes to get to the gentlemen who were checking IDs and boarding passes.  There were three of them and they were burning through the passengers at an awesome speed.  I was feeling good about their improved output.  Go airport security!

That was until I got through these ID-checkers and found there was nowhere to go on the other side because the two lanes of X-ray-ers hadn’t been able to absorb the impact of this improvement.  But the people behind me kept coming.  So, herd that we were, we kept trying to fit into the area between the checkers and the X-ray-ers, and our line got more and more crooked and bent away to the left.  The checkers were processing travelers with gusto. We filled up that space.  We spilled over into an area that was perhaps out-of-bounds.

I assume it was out-of-bounds, because that’s when we started getting yelled at.

So, I had to wonder, instead of yelling at us, couldn’t they have taken one of the guys off of ID checking detail and had him help with the X-ray processing?  Even if he isn’t certified on X-ray technology, he could be getting those bins lined up or helping people remember to take their laptops off or spotting those huge metal dangling earrings and full-arm-bracelets on the person in front of me before they try to get through the detector?

Similar Principles Arise with Agile Adoption

The same thing can happen with an Agile adoption.  It’s all well and good for a development team to adopt a few practices here and there and make their lives easier and improve their delivery.  Suddenly, you have a team that’s pumping out bits of code that can provide real value, but there’s some other group down the line that’s suddenly overwhelmed by this output.  The team is doing what it sees as its job and has optimized for release, but the local optimization impacts the overall system.

In Scrum, we start teams right off trying to help with this traditional optimization problem by pulling testing forward.  A delivery team is made up of developers and the testers and integrating their workflows. Involving them in the speed and planning improvements mitigates this firehose effect.

We’ve seen teams grasp this pretty quickly and Agile testing is no longer an oxymoron.  But what about the other teams that are affected?  We’re still seeing database teams and infrastructure teams that are segregated and isolated from the planning and execution of software development.  The marketing and customer-facing disciplines are often unable to understand how to go with the flow.  Since we care about full-delivery, the delivery is the full responsibility of a team and the best way to accomplish this is through a whole-team focus, a team that is composed of the right people to do the entire job, a cross-functional team.

Agile adoption is not just a whole-team effort, though; it’s a whole-organization effort.  Individual teams may adopt Agile, but without corresponding organization adjustment (creating the right truly cross-functional teams, scheduling vision and working packages to facilitate work management, creating a learning culture, supporting self-organization, etc), productivity increases will be washed away in argument and finger-pointing as other parts of the organization fail to have their gears mesh well with the teams that are changing.

Finding the Real Value of Agile Practices

Organizational structural change may be required, but it is only a tactical response.  The strategic piece is in the commitment to adopt Agile principles as well.  Agile practices work well because they map back to a set of Agile principles that guide personal interactions in the teams and super-teams.  The organizational leadership must be ready to lead the way by both showing and telling.  In the airport security example above, the root of the problem may have been an understanding and commitment to value.  It isn’t valuable to the customer to get through ID checking quickly.  The task is important, but it isn’t valuable on its own.  Sure the guys were doing a good job, but if I don’t get to my gate more quickly (without sacrificing security (there’s a whole post on quality wrapped in that parenthetical, eh?)), it doesn’t matter.  The value to the customer, and the thing that should be driving the entire group, is the final result.

However, if the high-performers are being rewarded for task execution instead of value execution, then there is nothing to encourage them to take up their Agile responsibilities and organize the workflow in such a way as to gain improvement.  They are being rewarded to look at local optimization instead of global optimization.  This is exactly what happens when you rate the quality of a tester on the number of defects she finds and on the developer when you rate only the number of new features she is delivering

An Agile organization encourages transparency and visibility because high-bandwidth communication between team members and between teams helps everyone involved perform and adjust as the work progresses.  We use burn down charts and taskboards to facilitate this communication and we have to recognize that it is the planning and execution of the work that is important, not the control of the initial plan.  This cannot work in a culture that is punishing me for showing that my tasks are going to take longer than originally planned. Only by giving you that information honestly and as early as possible, can we as a team do something about the problem.

Remember, you get what you measure for.  If we believe in the team-based and value-based principles, then our rewards and measures must reflect this.