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Agile Organization

Table of Contents

Defining Agile

The agile movement kicked off in 2001 with the agile manifesto. It emphasizes:

  • individuals and interactions over processes and tools,
  • working software over comprehensive documentation,
  • customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and
  • responding to change over following a plan.

Most people associate agile with SCRUM ceremonies, but there’s more to it. Agile means different things in different environments.

The essence of agile is to respond to change quickly, because you can’t predict every change or issue you’ll run into during a project.

It doesn’t mean you can’t make a plan. Agile is about making a plan but knowing it will change over time. You have to welcome those changes, because they will improve the end product.

Do you need a race car?

If a customer wants a race car, it’s impossible to deliver that in an agile fashion if your measurement of success is a deadline.

As an agile leader, you should first find out what the customer wants with your product. It might turn out that they don’t need a race car; they just want to cross the country quickly.

So, in the next sprint, you can build a regular car. Or you might not need to build anything at all and solve the problem by buying an airplane ticket. It’s not a race car, but the customer may find value in it. Then you can make small changes—add a better engine, improve the aerodynamics, install an audio system, working towards the perfect product in an agile way.

What does an agile organization look like?

Customer POV

If you are a truly agile organization, you’re constantly iterating and improving your product, and your customers recognize your efforts. It’s crucial to measure customer satisfaction by metrics applicable to your business, and to see if your target audience recognizes you as a constantly evolving business worth their trust and money.

Insider POV

Changes are for improvement

From the inside, a truly agile organization resembles an amoeba: it’s constantly changing shape based on its environment. It never remains the same for a long time.

The reason is that you have to define the minimum lovable product, then you gather input from all stakeholders, including sales, marketing, design, engineering, and the customer. Based on this feedback, your engineers can keep iterating the product to add value.

Small mistakes are easy to fix

When you make small incremental improvements in the product, the penalty for making the wrong choice is small. You'll quickly find out that you messed up. Negative metrics can guide you, so failing can be valuable, because it tells you where not to go.

Agile doesn’t have an end point

Being an agile organization means constant change, constant work, and constant evolution. This endless growth also means that there is no agile Nirvana. There will always be things to improve, changes to react to, and methods to rethink.

How can we put the agile philosophy into business?

Shared philosophy

A shared philosophy is crucial—your business won’t be able to thrive if everyone focuses on different objectives. It’s not only up to the engineers to create an agile environment; your sales and marketing teams also need to react to the small iterations quickly. If you want agile to work, the entire organization has to follow the agile philosophy.

Product focus

Although product, design, and engineering teams all play different roles in the product development process, good ideas can come from anyone at any stage.

Everyone has to be dedicated to the product. The job of product managers and engineers go hand in hand. A small code change can have unexpected effects on different parts of the product. It’s crucial that engineers understand the code and the impact it’s intended to have on the customer.

If your engineers have end-to-end ownership of a feature, deep understanding of the product is essential. When they are single-handedly responsible for writing, testing, and deploying a new feature, they must understand the intent behind it.

When your team is strongly product-oriented, changes are welcome, because everyone is working towards the same goal. That makes an organization truly agile.

Clearly defined roles

An agile organization must have clearly defined functions, and people must understand the role they play. If they are concerned with other people’s tasks, or if they are unsure of their own role, you can’t make progress and react to changes quickly. Ideally, the departments’ roles are the following:

Engineering

People on the engineering team write, test, and deliver code.

Product Management & Design/UX

People on the design or UX team receive feature requirements, and they collaborate with the engineering team to model how that requirement is going to land in the user experience.

What can leaders do to create an agile organization?

As a leader looking to create an agile culture, you must drive the processes that lead to a more agile organization. You can encourage certain behaviors to support this shift in mindset.

Welcome change

Changing requirements can be emotionally hard, especially if you learn them late. They invalidate hard work that has already been done.

However, don’t be frustrated about missing a requirement. Be glad you found out about it, and encourage your team to do the same.

Focus on milestones

If you’re focusing on deadlines instead of milestones, you are doing the opposite of agile. This doesn’t mean that deadlines and commitments are useless; it just means that they’re not accurate measurements of success for an agile organization. As an agile leader, you should measure the incremental value for customers instead.

Strive for “pretty good”

Don’t expect perfection immediately. Agile means striving for pretty good. As your customer base is evolving, your product will improve as well, and so will your team and their practices. “Pretty good” provides a stable starting point from which you can iterate later on.

Be vulnerable

Agile creates a constantly changing environment. That can be stressful at times. As a leader, you should lean into vulnerability—it’s one of the most valuable skills your team has to master. Know that there’s an effect between team and product: if you want your product to improve, your team must constantly do the same. Without a well-organized team lead with empathy, it’s impossible to make decisions or changes in your product smoothly.

Is agile always the most beneficial working method?

There are cases when the Waterfall or Spiral approach is more suitable, depending on the product you’re building. If you have to deliver something that you can’t incrementally update later, like the Mars Rover for NASA, you only get one chance to get it right, and you have to plan accordingly.

How do you overcome the internal resistance when trying to go agile with your organization?

On 2021 - 2022 I was involved one of Asia’s leading HRIS Software company, operating under Asia’s leading business expansion specialist. A 20+ year old company with rigid structure, and a very non-agile workflows was quite a challenge to deal with.

That one year was quite a ride, I’ve so much at that time, especially on people management.

What I’ve learned during my tenure to overcome the resistance was to:

Know the common frustrations

Most people are uncomfortable with agile due to the lack of predictability. The hard part is that you won’t feel the benefit of agile unless your entire business is aware of the value. Without alignment, doing agile is hard.

Customize success metrics

To see the added value of each iteration, you must pay attention to agile deliverables. Success metrics need to be tailored to each feature, because you can’t measure different things with the same set of criteria.

Define the success metric for the engineering team, and set up an analytics engine to gather data and an analytics team to dissect that data. That way, you’ll be able to provide a clear picture to your team, even with the inherent unpredictability of agile.

What are the typical mistakes an organization can make when going agile?

Forcing unnecessary ceremonies

The most common misconception is that agile is a set of ceremonies. In reality, you don’t have to do any of the SCRUM rituals in order to be agile.

Limiting agile to engineering

Your entire business has to be agile, not just specific teams. Engineering is the heart of a software engineering company, but all departments must have the same work philosophy, with the same goals in mind in a truly agile organization.

The customer-obsessed and agile mindset needs to be. culture must be spread across the entire company. If that is not done well, we will face resistance, even worse compared to not transitioning to agile since we are working in different mindsets. Frictions between silos is unavoidable. Decision making will be flow and conflicts will be unavoidable.

SCRUM ceremonies at Systeric

We let our teams be independent and autonomous. We don’t dictate on how to run projects on each squad. But we also keep in mind the boundaries in order to maintain structure while moving fast so that we don’t break things :)

So the rigidness of the process depends on each squad. But we normally have the following ceremonies:

  • Stand-ups
  • Sprints

    • Two-week sprints remained useful. We still had to plan and groom out the work.

  • Retrospectives

    • Sprint retros are one of the most important conversations. They help your team look back on what went well and what didn’t. Retros also help in tracking improvement, disclosing recurring issues, and addressing any ideas or problems.

What are the signs of your organization becoming truly agile?

Although agile doesn’t have a specific end destination to reach, you can tell whether your team has embraced it or not. When you have psychological safety within the organization, and everyone is brave enough to welcome questions, to make changes, and to be vulnerable about the frustrations they have along the way, you have reached agile Nirvana.

When your organization is truly agile, your product is based on functionality and customer feedback. You retire useless features instead of sticking to your initial plans. You are ready to respond to changes quickly and effectively.

In that environment, people are collaborative, the product is constantly evolving, and your customers recognize the added value. This is why it’s important to become an agile organization. When you, your employees and your product all become agile, you can reach this ideal state.