Agile

Organizing For Uncertainty

The Principles, Practices, and Payoffs of a Rich Agile Model

for the Organization of Work

2009 Jack Ricchiuto

Agile is a model for the organization of work that originally emerged in the software development industry. The most unique characteristic of agile, in contrast to traditional project management approaches, is that it is responsively change-friendly rather than rigidly change-phobic.

Over the past decade, agile has expanded to include other best practice models and has grown in application beyond software development and project contexts. It is now easily adaptable to any kind of project and operational contexts imaginable.

A rich agile model is agile plus any number of complementary and synergistic principles and practices from approaches like: chaos and complexity sciences, strength-based organization models, visual workplace tools, lean methodologies, and project management best practices.

Understanding a rich agile approach starts with an appreciation for the reality that change always was and always will be a constant in any environment where the organization of work directly impacts team performance and satisfaction. All of the traditional approaches to planning were designed around the assumption that change could be designed out of the equation. This results in wasteful and costly strategies for resisting resiliency. It also implicitly and insidiously makes continuous learning and innovation impossible because by definition, all learning and innovation is the creation of the unpredictable.

When uncertainty becomes a tool rather than a risk, teams thrive in their capacity for learning, innovation, and resiliency. These become more important in environments of constraints and volatility. In a rich agile approach, the team remains confidently skillful in organizing for uncertainty.

For as much as organizations invest in trying to create wall-to-wall certainty, there are 9 kinds of unpredictable & unpreventable changes that can impact a team's organization of work, regardless of any mandates, plans, commitments, or requirements they may be given.

1.The decision makers' and users' evolving clarity about what they really want
2.Business priorities and strategic decisions
3.Market opportunities and trends
4.Technical, resource, and political constraints
5.The team's sense of what's possible
6.Changes in legislation and funding
7.Unpredictable ideas, solutions, and innovations
8.Unexpected collaborators and partners
9.The team's capabilities and capacity

For most teams, these are givens: things the team must work with because they are beyond the team's scope of power to prevent. A rich agile model gives teams the power to be impeccably honest and faithful about their delivering value no matter what changes occur.

There are 9 practices a team can engage in the organization of their work no matter what kinds of change occur, when, how often, or why.

1.They can maintain an ongoing list of specific measurable success indicators from decision makers from which to work
2.They can know and understand the details of the "user experience" better than decision makers have the time to do
3.They can give decision makers the freedom to change the urgency order of this list any time they want based on changes they experience
4.They can translate success indicators into "products" the team can promise, design, build, test, and deliver every two weeks
5.They can maintain a shared virtual space where the status of their activities can be viewed by anyone anytime
6.They can work as a self-organizing team that outperforms managed teams without the costs of management
7.They can sustain very high levels of estimation accuracies by planning work in 2-week iterations
8.They can engage and combine the team's strengths in ways that make their weaknesses irrelevant
9.They can use continuous learning from experience to continuously improve their velocity and resiliency

All performance is shaped by principles and the principles of a rich agile model give teams the ability to engage these practices in everything they do day after day, week after week, quarter after quarter.

There are 9 Principles in a rich agile model that sustain high levels of team performance, innovation, and spirit.

1.Iterative design/ a design methodology based on a cyclic process of prototyping, testing, analyzing, and refining a product or process that ultimately improves the quality and functionality of a design
2.Self-organization/ The team shares decisions, tasks, responsibilities, and information
3.Responsiveness to change/ The team designs change into its plans rather than treating change as an obstacle to its success
4.Reality-based decisions/ Trust no assumptions as much as you trust your questions
5.Culture of trust/ Be impeccably honest about what you know and don't know - say and do only what adds to your trustworthiness
6.Transparency/ Maintain a visual environment where everything known is shared
7.Fast paybacks / Create the simplest versions of deliverables to earn the quickest paybacks possible
8.Continuous learning/ Have no higher purpose in any conversation than shared learning
9.Collaboration/ Expect that we will always be able to do more together than we can in opposition or isolation

A rich agile model for the organization of work has several distinct advantages over traditional change-resistant approaches. In change-resistant approaches, there are more liabilities and risks than payoffs, evidenced by the huge percentage of failed projects across sectors, industries, and geographies.

In change-resistant approaches, people can spend more time planning and reporting than actually doing the work. Rigid plan models define intelligent resilience as an indicator of failure. Teams need to be expensively managed because they are never continuously clear what they're actually doing with their costly time and talent. Someone is punished with the costs of change once plans are approved. To protect the organization from change, clients are adversarial negotiation opponents rather than collaborative partners in continuous shared learning. Because innovation is explicitly the creation of surprise, no inflexible planning models can help create it, and actually only prevent it.

In contrast, there are 9 payoffs of a rich agile approach to the organization of work.

1.The model thrives in project, operational and combined hybrid work organization environments
2.A rich agile approach doesn't require any specific configuration of personality types or styles
3.Business owners and clients have continuous and trustworthy visibility of what the team is doing & are treated as co-learner collaborators
4.A rich agile model gives the team the best of both worlds: capacity to be both proactively strategic about its intentional opportunities and responsively adaptable to unpredictable opportunities.
5.As a self-organizing team, the team is 50-150% more efficient and productive than a traditional manager-dependent team
6.In contrast to inflexible long-range planning that is at least 80% inaccurate, the short planning iterations allow planning to be continuously 90-95% accurate
7.In projects like software development projects, instead of the usual 20% actually used functionality, agile teams produce 80% and more used functionality
8.Because the success indicator list is up to date, the team only works on what will have the highest use for customers/clients and highest payback for the business
9.The model guarantees that every two weeks the team will produce high use, high payback deliverables. The accelerates their learning curve, making the team continuously more capable of taking on more complex metrics, products and tasks.

The good news is that it is possible for all teams to make seamless and relatively quick transitions to rich agile models of organizing their work for optimum performance and results.