The paper Agile Base Patterns in the Agile Canon, Daniel R Greening, 2016 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences is an important contribution to the discussion of agile at scale in organizations beyond 5 developers at the table with their customer.
The Agile Cannon is composed of 5 elements
- Measure Economic Progress
- Plans don't guarantee creative success - creative efforts operate in an economy - as system where people manage limited resources to maximize return and growth
- Forces on economic progress
- Economics - actions that be participants without well-defined economic guidance, wander aimlessly. They don't know what they value. They don't know their costs
- Measurement - lagging measures applied to current decisions can fail perversely
- When measurement drives rewards, perceived value is gamed. Creativity is improved with rewards of mastery, autonomy, and purpose [1]
- Measure economic progress with well-chosen, evolving metrics
- Identify desired outcomes
- Identify relevant metrics
- Create a forecasting discipline
- Embrace objectivity
- Evolve
- Proactively Experiment to Improve
- Not improving fast enough
- Forces on proactive improvement
- Complacency - passive observation
- Loss of control creates risk of failure
- Quest for control (in manufacturing sense) makes innovation harder [2]
- Non-creative work is easier
- Uncertainty creates confusion
- Proactively experiment to improve
- Run adaptive improvement experiments
- Before changing anything assess different options and explore possible results
- Experiments can be evolutionary or revolutionary
- Establish a hypothesis
- Innovation causes variability
- Kaizen emphasis on small improvements
- Variation accompanies chaos and complex adaptive systems
- Two solutions to all this
- Compensate for metric variations by including learning metrics
- Compensate for cost variation by including risk reduction metrics
- Teams that apply experiment techniques can become hyper-productive [3]
- Limit Work-In-Progress
- When going too slow, more detailed plans makes it worse
- Forces on WIP
- Inventory - fungible assets helps increase productivity, but increase costs
- Congestion - as randomly timed requests increase system utilization, delay before request started increases exponentially
- Cognition - the most limited resource for creative people is time and attention
- Limit WIP to improve value flow
- Cognition and backlogs = a clear mind helps prioritize work
- Focus on most profitable work
- Establish a Zero backlog approach to planning - Scrum creates Sprint Backlog. Highly effective Scrum teams have seven items in Sprint Backlog
- Create fractually structured Product Backlog - seven small backlog items, followed by seven bigger ones. Fractually Structured backlog limits the amount of planned effort invested early in a large project, reducing planning, decreasing sunk cost bias, and encourages rapid adoption to new information
- Collaborative Focus
- Swarm on top most items
- Goal is completion - shippable product
- Communication delays are a form of WIP
- Value Stream Optimization
- Visibly track active work by category
- Limit WIP in each category
- Organize using VSM [4]
- Cognition and backlogs = a clear mind helps prioritize work
- Embrace Collective Responsibility
- Forces on Collective Responsibility
- Readily claim responsibility for success, but refrain from claim responsibility for failure
- Deny the problem
- Blame others
- Blame circumstances
- Feel obligation to keep doing our job
- Readily claim responsibility for success, but refrain from claim responsibility for failure
- Help People embrace collective responsibility
- Autonomy
- Understanding
- Agency
- Organizational culture largely determines if teams and individuals embrace and sustain collective responsibility
- Forces on Collective Responsibility
- Solve Systemic Problems
- Forces on systemic problems
- Operating with many actors, dysfunctions of others limits agility
- Competing for attention from dependencies creates queue that increases latency
- Collaboratively analyze and mitigate systemic dysfunction
- Root Cause Analysis [5]
- Static analysis - dependency mapping
- Dynamic analysis - analyze flow
- Forces on systemic problems
[1] D. Pink, Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us (2011).
[2] R. Ashkenas, “It’s Time to Rethink Continuous Improvement,” HBR blog http://j.mp/hbrci (2012).
[3] C.R. Jakobsen et al, “Scrum and CMMI – Going from Good to Great: Are you ready-ready to be done-done?” Agile Conference 2009, IEEE.
[4] G. Alleman, "Product & Process Development Kaizen for Software Development, Project, and Program Management, LPPDE, Denver Colorado, April 2008
[5] D.R. Greening, “Agile Pattern: Social Cause Mapping,” http://senexrex.com/cause-mapping/ (2015).
