Many definitions and resources provide a variety of answers to this question, what is agile?
Some would point you to the Agile Manifesto, while others would point to agile project management frameworks and methodologies like Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, and others.
However, there still needs to be more clarity about what it means to be agile.
Let’s demystify Agile from a practical perspective.
There are a few parameters that can tell you whether you are on the right track toward agility or not.
Table of Contents
Work In Progress (WIP)
A higher amount of work in Progress poses multiple challenges. The primary among them is that getting feedback on what you are doing takes time. Delayed feedback makes it more challenging to change course. The higher amount of WIP also means the focus is lost, potentially losing productivity and quality.
Feedback Loops
While WIP will affect the speed of feedback and how fast teams can learn, there are other factors besides this. First, you must examine your overall process to ensure that input comes to you faster. Not only that, but you must also be acting upon that feedback more quickly.
The feedback loop is at the foundation of the iterative approach that agile approaches adopt. If your iterations are shorter, your feedback loops are also faster, allowing agile teams to alter the course quickly.
Workflows
How your teams are organized, and even within a team, how the work is organized is critical. When there are too many hand-offs, there is a greater risk of the work to be taking longer, priorities not being right, and the team not working as a single unit with a focused commitment toward a single goal. Such a structure might even lack the creative solution definition through collaboration.
Automation
How well do you automate your work? The automation will enable work in smaller batches and get feedback early. It also reduces the time wasted because of manual errors.
Empowered Teams
Team empowerment means moving the decision-making capabilities to the collective team. Teams do the work. They can ensure better outcomes if they control how they want to do that. The topic is quite complex; you can read more about the general aspects of empowered, self-organizing teams in this article. I will publish another article on the practical aspects of building such teams and how they b soon.
Let’s see the first four factors in detail.
Understanding WIP
The amount of WIP is one of the critical indicators determining your process efficiency.
Understanding the meaning of WIP and how to address the ill effects of having Progress WIP is therefore critical.
WIP, or the Work In Process, is all the work you started but still need to finish.
Often, the terms, Work in process and work in Progress indicate the Same thing. However, they might have different connotations. Work In Progress may mean something that is yet to be fully defined. It might be an idea, or it might be building something without a clear end. Hence, Work In Process is the preferred term to denote incomplete work.
With the longer WIP, the following are the challenges;
1. More time for value-realization
2. Longer feedback loops
3. Lack of focus, potentially affecting both efficiency and quality
4. Possible technical debt as the incomplete work adds to the waste
There are multiple strategies to deal with the WIP.
1. WIP Limits, as suggested by Kannan, are one way to define the number of work items that can be in the process at any point in time. However, this approach sometimes leads to artificial limits placed on the amount of work a person, team, or team can do.
2. The second approach is to ensure that, as a group, the focus is on finishing all open items before starting another. So, for example, if a developer finishes implementing a user story, she will help other developers finish their stories before beginning with a new story of her own.
Such a collaborative approach needs an organizational environment where the individual quantum of work is not the measure of performance, but the collective outcome is. Hence, while effective, this strategy is challenging to implement in real life.
However, with both these strategies, how you define your work item is most critical. The smaller yet meaningful work item size is crucial for either strategy’s success.
Breaking up the work into smaller chunks, and focusing on finishing it rather than starting new work, can help you reduce the WIP. A reduced WIP will help you become agile in its true sense.
Agile Workflows
The extent of sequential hand-offs determines the agility of your workflows.
Each work item flows in a sequence. However, agile workflows differ from traditional flows in that one entire phase about the whole quantum of work will be finished first in traditional workflows before another activity starts. The water flow model is the best representation of this approach. There are multiple problems with this approach, and they have been sufficiently discussed, so we will not go into that.
Agile workflows, however, break down the work into smaller, valuable work items and focus on finishing each item through all activities.
Many will argue that this approach involves adopting multiple, smaller waterfall workflows. And they won’t be entirely wrong.
That’s where the second differentiation comes into the picture. And it has to do with how the hand-offs work.
With traditional workflows, one team does requirements analysis; another does design and Modeling, a separate team for development, and another for testing. You get the gist.
Agile workflows differ in that while there might be separate people with specialized responsibilities, they look at working as a team to complete each work item from start to finish as the priority. Different people are open to contributing to other roles.
This approach allows for continuous prioritization, ensuring you focus on the most valuable work at any time.
Understanding and implementing such workflows are complex. Unfortunately, no framework or agile methodology provides clear guidance on these. To an extent, Extreme Programming (XP) ‘s Pair Programming concepts indicate how the hands-offs can be reduced.
The objective should be to minimize the sequential hand-offs.
Unfortunately, given the realities of practical business requirements, you will be unable to eliminate them.
However, reducing such dependencies will help you consistently deliver the most valuable results, with the flexibility of adapting to possible changes as required.
Value Stream Analysis can be a critical tool to achieve that.
Understanding Feedback Loops
One of the fundamental essences of agility is in the teams’ and organizations’ ability to quickly change the course based on market conditions, customer feedback, and other external factors. The length of feedback loops determines whether such a response’s speed is adequate.
The term feedback loop indicates two aspects;
1. The capability to receive feedback quicker
2. The ability to incorporate that feedback back into the work
Many teams and organizations are in a position to gather external feedback quickly. However, they may not be able to implement it back to work.
Other elements of agility become critical to enabling both these aspects to be present. Notably amongst them are the size of the WIP and the size of the work items themselves.
However, integrating the feedback into the work may require additional environmental factors. Most notably, it is far more effective with empowered teams.
Without empowerment, the feedback received from the users, customers, and market, in general, may get lost in lengthy discussions and approval hierarchies.
You can implement the feedback loops in the following four steps;
1. Receive observations or feedback. The feedback can come from external sources like customers or the overall business environment, or the source can also be internal from within the team or the organization.
2. Convert the observations into a data format that you can analyze.
3. Perform the analysis of the feedback data and conclude. These conclusions can be in terms of taking some actions. For example, improving a feature or removing it altogether.
4. Implement the actions and gather further feedback on the changed system.
The feedback loops are classified as negative or positive feedback loops based on the kind of action that results from the feedback.
The positive feedback loop is where a specific action or feature is enhanced or improved further.
A negative feedback loop is where a specific action is stopped, or a feature or process step is removed due to the feedback.
Ensuring that the length of your feedback loops, positive and negative, is shorter provides that you can respond more quickly and appropriately to external and internal changes.
The ability of such a quick response is the hallmark of agility.
Why Automation?
Automation can be defined as the application of technologies or processes to minimize, preferably eliminate, human intervention from routine, non-value-adding, and repetitive tasks.
While agility is possible without automation, Aas technology becomes an integral aspect of functioning for businesses of all sizes across the domains and the world; automation plays a crucial part in providing the edge to the companies depending upon the extent to which and how automation is utilized. Hence, from the future perspective, it is crucial to include automation in your agility endeavors.
For automation to be truly effective, there are two factors that you must pay attention to beyond just automating the processes, operations, and work.
Elimination
The first is elimination. Since automation may obscure the visibility of redundant or unnecessary steps in your value stream, you should proactively identify what steps can be eliminated continuously. An automated lousy process is still a flawed process. Hence, even with automation, optimizing the processes further is critical.
Automation helps achieve agility by reducing uncertainties, providing visibility, freeing time for team members to focus on value-adding tasks, and facilitating continuous delivery of value to customers.
Conclusion
If you carefully examine these four factors, you will realize that they map nicely to the values and principles defined in the Agile Manifesto. Those fundamentals are still relevant, and if you are working towards making your teams and organization agile, start by paying attention to the above four areas. Irrespective of the frameworks and methodologies you use, it is critical that you focus on the essence of agility. There are other parameters; however, these four form the foundation for others. To reiterate;
- Are you decreasing the delays in your deliverables?
- Are you shortening the time between the work and the feedback received?
- Are you ensuring that you are making the size of the work queues is getting smaller? Not only that, are you ensuring that the size of the work unit is also decreasing?
- Are you ensuring that the teams are communicating & collaborating effectively toward a shared purpose?
If the answer to these questions is yes, you have found the meaning of agility.
Are you looking for a more in-depth introduction? Then, read Fundamentals of Agile: A Simple Yet Comprehensive Guide for Beginners.
