Agility

• The power of moving quickly and easily
• The ability for companies to stay competitive in their business by adjusting and adapting to new innovative ideas and using these ideas to create new products and services as well as new business models.

These are just two definitions of agility to contextualise this reflection.

Several Companies have a wishful quest to become agile. But do they really take it seriously? I mean, in depth? I don’t really think so!!

Where is the blind spot then?

To understand the movement towards agility, you have to understand:

• the foundation of management and organisation sciences - crystallised in the organisation designe and managerial practices.
• the birth of agile methods (as one of the exercises of bringing agility to companies).

Organisation as a Machine

Organisational theory at play as a predominant metaphor: “the organisation as a machine”. We frequently use words like: "we have to fixe this process"; “the process is oiled now”; “finally the machinery is running”.

The main reason is related with the foundations of both disciplines of Organisational Design. Both born in industrial revolution, were the metaphor was naturaly applicable to the machine as key element of the factory and most workers performed repetitive task. Although several industrial born methods were successfully adopted by other lines of business (Total Quality Management; Lean; JIT), the underlying understanding of the world, limits the full understanding of were can the metaphor work were does it come short.

In presence of uncertainty and market dynamics, the factory model comes short, leading frequently to process rigidity and adaptation inability.

Internet as metaphor

Internet brings us an improve metaphor. Internet as structure and rigidity, allowing millions of machines and man to interact but also an almost unlimited capability to adopt and evolve.

Internet demonstrates how an uncountable number of interconnect elements, operating independently, achieve common goals.

Such context gave birth to self organised phenomenon such as Open Source or the wikipedia. Both are testimonial of: how to empower and unleash creativity based on a small set of rules.

From Internet Metaphor to Agile method

Such environment influence the debate giving birth to Agile methodology. Software development methods such as waterfall, used by practitioners and reference by academics were not able to cope with dynamics of businesses, leading to unsatisfied customers, unsatisfied professionals, over budget and overrun projects.

The founders of Agile Methods were confronted with the results of Open Source SW production, much different from the work they were doing in their companies. The question become natural: why does open source seems to produce much more with fewer rules?

Such debate gave birth to the Agile Manifesto - a set of 4 transformation rules and 12 principles.

The Manifesto acknowledged reality: of costumers need to evolve their thoughts and therefor their SW during the full project life cycle; the value of proving concepts in an interactive approach, learning and adjusting. Agility replaced rigidity on every stage of the process.

Although Agile might seem a chaotic, unruled process, it is quite the opposite. The methodology demands rigour and discipline, in addition, it envolves and demands responsibility and commitment from all parties involved in the process.

Also DevOps resulted from the inadeqacy of IT Operations response on organisations adopting Agile Methods. IT Operations were used to deal with changes in months cycles (3, 6 or even 12 months). With Agile, changes were coming in days (15 days or less) and support processes needed to be adjusted in short cycles. it just did not work. Back to the factory metaphor, it was like if you changed your production machines to produce 10x faster, but your packaging was still operating as before. DevOps focussed on CAMS - Culture, Automation, Measurement and Sharing - as key elements of the proposed change.

Although Agile and DevOps keywords sound like music to organisations, its adoption frequently fails. Why?

Agility Fatality

Among others, I see 3 critical failure factors. All relate to the same fact: the adoption of such principles requires you to drop the old factory metaphor and adopt an organic view of interconnected elements.

• Control Dilema: Control needs to be truly distributed. People doing the job know the job and control the outcomes.
• Cooperation and colaboration: you need both in place. The key enablers are transparency to build trust and failure embracing to build strong learning processes.
• Propose: is the invisible glue, the secret ingredient. Agility effectiveness needs a strong propose. Otherwise you move but in a disfunctional way - in all directions.

If you are not willing to give-up control, your intersect motivations are not compiling or trust and transparency are only buzzwords, don't even think on Agility.