Organizational Agility

Agile software development is not the same as organizational agility. In fact, many Agile practices decrease organizational agility. For example, long-lived, fully-dedicated, cross-functional Agile teams, and the scaled Agile frameworks that support them, decrease organizational agility because they inhibit the team formation process.

For an organization to be agile, it needs to be able to quickly configure and reconfigure people from throughout the organization to respond to new and changing priorities. Teams needs to be both self-organizing and self-managing.

Later I will explain how to do this, but first, let’s look at the problem with long-lived, fully-dedicated, cross-functional Agile teams and scaled Agile frameworks:

Scenario

You are a development manager for a large organization that has adopted a popular scaled Agile framework. You agreed to fully dedicate your resources to the teams in the framework and not pull them away because the coaches explained Agile teams need to be fully dedicated and long-lived.

A strategic initiative comes in that does not fit into the value streams in the scaled framework. The enterprise-level priority of the strategic initiative is high, as is the political visibility.

You know you should reallocate some of your resources from the teams in the framework to work on the initiative, but you can’t because you agreed to fully dedicate them and not pull them away.

What Went Wrong

There is no question fully dedicated, long-lived teams are more productive than partially dedicated, temporary ones, but team efficiency is not the same as organizational agility. The scaled frameworks increase the agility of teams inside of them the team are agile, but the frameworks themselves are agile. They are highly productive at producing enhancements to existing solutions, but they are virtually incapable of responding with agility to strategic initiatives that can have much greater ROI. They optimize existing value streams, but do not easily accommodate future ones.

Heavy-weight scaled frameworks cannot accommodate new value streams without either building the framework out, which requires finding new resources, or reconfiguring the teams within it, which requires time-consuming centralized planning, aka WASTE, and halts the collection of metrics from the teams in the framework.

What Is Needed

No, a policy that Agile teams are long-lived is not okay. Long-lived teams should be dedicated to professional specialties—centers of excellence—including both products and supporting disciplines such as infrastructure, data modeling, AI, etc. These experts should be flexibly “mixed and matched based on a dynamic flow of initiative. Remember, enhancing legacy systems may not be as good an investment as new strategic initiatives!

For an organization to be truly agile, resources from any relevant area of expertise throughout the organization need to be able self-organize into cross-functional teams and networks of teams as priorities change at both the enterprise and product level.

And it needs an agile priority setting process that manages the portfolio of requests from all sources, e.g., product-level, enterprise-level. Without such a process, prioritization conflicts will be systemic.

This may sound like anarchy, but it’s not. It can be done and it’s needed today in a world where business strategies can turn on a dime—Think Covid, wars, and AI popping into the realm of feasibility.

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