Agile FAD Reduction – is a conscious organizational effort, geared towards a gradual reduction of misunderstanding, misinterpretation, errors and omissions, associated with a widespread “let’s do agile” industry trend.
The need for these reduction efforts has become more urgent over the last couple of years, as many organizations have gone down the wrong path of fast-tracking their agile transformations, in broad and shallow ways, without making any meaningful, systemic improvements. Many such agile FADs have been manifested through “big bang” installations of large, commercially available frameworks, accompanied by tooling solutions, and usually promoted by large consultancies, with ladder being financially rewarded by frameworks and tooling companies.
If you recognize any of the below “FADs” (the list is not conclusive and only most commonly seen FADs is listed), you may wish to consider doing a very comprehensive look-back reassessment (a.k.a. enterprise-wide retrospective) of what your organization has done, how much it cost and, very importantly, what was the achieved ROI.
Please, note that in order to clearly “see” FADs, you may need to seek help of someone, who is not a part of your organizational structure and can objectively look from outside-in, share an unbiased and impartial perspective on the situation and recommend steps for an improvement:
Organizational & Transformational Leadership:
- Mid-level management, PMO, centralized “power towers”, leading agile transformation
- Too many town hall motivational speeches, with little action
- Senior managers, delegating learning to subordinates and not doing GEMBA
- Senior managers, not staying around long enough to see/take responsibility for their decisions
- Large consulting agencies, providing guidance at astronomically high costs
Budgeting/Finance:
- Budgets, remaining fixed and fiscal-year-end based (as opposed to becoming flexible/dynamic)
- Budgets, traditionally cascading down from portfolios, to programs and projects
- Budgets, not being defined for properly defined products
- Funding temporary, short-lived project teams
- Funding single-function specialty/component teams
HR Norms & Policies:
- Continuing individual performance appraisals (IPA)
- Coupling individual performance with bonuses and other financial perks
- Having too many organizational/reporting layers and command & control management style
- Not being able to provide a competitive compensation that attracts top talent workers
- Having big gaps between compensation of managers and workers
Products:
- Falling into a trap of “everything is a product” (fake productization)
- Creating convoluted structures of products / “sub”- and “sub-sub”-products
- Defining products around technology domains, not business/customer use areas
- Defining products, based on a traditional reporting structure
- Not involving key business stakeholders in a product definition
Agile Roles:
- Project managers (lower ranked), becoming Scrum Masters
- Project managers (higher ranked) and program managers, becoming agile coaches
- Business analysts, becoming “team-level” product owners
- Portfolio and program managers, becoming “senior” product owners
- Real product managers, not finding time to play a product owner role
Frameworks & Tooling:
- Spending massive funds on frameworks’ versioning and tooling licenses
- “Mapping” existing organizational design to a “levels” that are defined by frameworks
- Overwhelming internal jargon with complex framework terminology
- Defining work breakdown structure (WBS) through hierarchical levels of commercial tools
- Enforcing processes and ways of working, based on workflows, dictated by tools
Metrics & Reporting:
- Measuring things that are easy to measure, not things that are important
- Relying on metrics and reports (not GEMBA), as primary means of communication
- Weaponizing metrics against individuals and teams, leading to numbers-gaming
- Collecting metrics on outputs, not outcomes/business impact
- Not being able to measure and report on ROI of specific work and an overall transformation effort