Agile Coaching

Leadership Through Change

by Krishna Chodipilli | Mar 10, 2021 | Agile Coaching, Leadership And Management

In today’s world, change and chaos are inevitable, and there is no way around them. As a leader, you need to embrace the change and work your way out through all the mess!

“One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognise a problem before it becomes an emergency.” —Arnold Glasow

The world around us keeps changing rapidly, and we are forced to make massive changes these days. If you continue leading with the same old traditional ways that your company has always used, it will most likely fail to succeed. Leadership through change is the ultimate solution to it.

What Is Leadership Through Change?

Leadership through change requires simultaneously optimising an organisation’s culture and making investments to enhance business growth. It creates experiences for individuals who develop new possibilities while combining them to initiate strategies that exploit the resources to triumph in the marketplace.

However, those who lead through change in the wrong way can face swift and painful consequences. In this regard, Transformational leadership lets you refine the change leadership into bite-sized chunks for effective implementation.

The organisations that dominate the market possess leadership traits of knowing how to lead effectively through change than anyone else and bring out the best in their employees during such an uncertain changing environment.

“Change leadership is the art and then the science of influencing people to engage in change and then navigating a journey together from their current state to a desired future state.” – Hawkes

Key Strategies for Leadership through Change

·      Staying Purpose-Driven

If your company is facing turbulent times, you need to stay purpose-driven to lead through change successfully. If the organisational leadership lacks a sense of purpose, how will the employees stay on track? It is not just the company that depends on the executive leadership but its people as well.

It is acceptable not knowing what to do at the start; you might even end up being more stressed than you have ever been in your career. However, if you divert all your focus towards your purpose and creating a purpose-driven culture, all the “how’s” and “what-ifs” will eventually be answered.

·      Taking Communication Seriously

You already know how crucial communication is; everyone keeps emphasising effective communication. Many organisations undervalue the importance of communication, mostly during the period of significant change.

Communication, when done correctly, results in significant relationships, which is essential for organisational health. Communication of all the changes and situations must be shared among all the departments to ensure effectiveness. When all teams coordinate with each other, they can perform at a high level.

Leadership through change requires leaders to communicate from a technical aspect while reinforcing the need for inspiration and acknowledgement of their people. So, the next time any change hits your company, no matter how small or big, make it a priority to take communication seriously and give your 100%.

·      Consider Employees as an Asset and Invest in Them

Being a leader, you should know that your most significant assets are the people who work with you. These individuals are expected to carry out your objective and vision through each transition happening at your organisation due to change. It depends on them to make the transition successful or unsuccessful, so it is wise to invest in them.

Depending on your company’s size, try to invest in your people as much as you can. Successful organisations are passionate about building their people to attain a top position in the market.

The investment can be made in several different ways, like initiating team-building exercises, enhancing skill sets, bringing in experts, and much more. Adaptive leadership will help your company thrive through change and show your compassion towards your team.

·      Persistence is the Key!

Honestly, no one likes change, especially your employees. Change initiates a sense of uncertainty, and your people will be tempted to slow down, give up and eventually lose the focus of the overall goal. As a leader, it is you’re your job to instil persistence until you succeed.

There is no doubt that it gets tough to move forward when you feel like nothing is being accomplished or the results are not as you expected them to be. This is where persistence comes in and rescues you. It is one of the most important leadership traits that let your organisation thrive during the phase of extreme change.

Successful Change Efforts

Change breeds fear and uncertainty, which often leads to unsuccessful efforts!

When people are not sure and lack the courage to embrace the change and take the necessary efforts, the successful transition becomes a challenge.

Center for creative leadership researched to figure out the competencies needed for change-capable leaders. They divided them into three major categories and called them “The three C’s of change” for leading the process along with the people.

Let’s take a look at the Three C’s of Effective Change Leadership. When united, these three C’s bring effective change leadership.

1.    Communicate

As mentioned before, in every aspect, the most important factor is communication. But, a leader must know how to do it the correct way. Communicating the change, explaining the purpose and connecting it with your organisation’s values is the key to successful communication. When leaders explain the benefits of change, people tend to adapt to all the changes and stay motivated.

2.    Collaborate

All the dominating organisations have a collaborative culture where they make the most out of each person’s skills and ideas. For organisational leadership, it is crucial to bring people together for each phase, including planning, implementing and executing change. Leaders who work across boundaries and encourage their employees to come out of their caves and refuse any unhealthy competition will most definitely succeed. Thought leadership involves doing all sorts of collaborations rather than including your employees in the change process when 80% of the planning is done.

3.    Commit

Although change is difficult and no one enjoys it, the leaders who were able to negotiate it successfully were willing to step out of their comfort zone and become persistent and resilient towards the goals. Leadership skills include committing with beliefs and behaviours that supported the change. Along with that, they must devote most of their time to it and keep their focus on the big picture.

The Do’s and Don’ts of Leadership Through Change

Leadership through change might seem impossible as you don’t know where the next turn will take you. It is virtuous to learn from others’ experiences to know which road to take and which to avoid. We have gathered some dos and don’ts of leading through change to not repeat the same mistakes as others.

✔ Let Others Know What You Know

One common mistake among leaders is that they keep the bad news or critical information to themselves, and employees have no idea about it, making them even more anxious. They are an equal part of the organisation as you are; you are not the only person feeling confused and troubled at the sudden change. Try your best to engage them and fill them in on crucial details and deadlines. Keep them updated with everything as you find out new information. Keeping your people informed will take away some of their uncertainty, and they will be encouraged to cooperate.

✔ Outline the Action Plan

Once you know how to go, make an action plan and divide the work for each team member. Choose them wisely according to their skills and competencies, utilise each person’s unique talents to enhance the change process. Rather than sharing the broad picture or the expected results, take them through each step of the journey and let them give their input when needed. When they start offering their ideas, it will stir up ownership and boost their confidence.

✔ Reduce Conflicts

While talking about change, how can we forget the growing number of conflicts? When an organisation is going towards a new path, conflicts will arise. Your people might be frustrated at the idea of change or fail to understand their roles. No matter what reason, organisational leadership includes resolving conflicts positively and constructively. In this way, your company’s transition will be much smoother.

✔ Don’t forget to invest time for questions

Going through a transition might tempt you to accelerate through each process in which you forget to give enough time for essential questions from your team. It is necessary to leave the door open for all your people’s concerns and questions whenever they arise. Encourage everyone to share their worries, reserve some time from your schedule for questions and clearing out any queries. Employees usually fail to ask by themselves, so you can ask, “what can I do to help you?” to show them your concern and commitment.

✔ Don’t usher all the elements of change at once

Diving in headfirst into the transition or ripping off the Band-Aid is probably not a good idea, no matter how tempting it may seem at that time. Ushering in all the elements of change at once can be a destructive factor in your change process. Adaptive leadership includes gradually rolling out the change your people are supposed to make and giving them prior notice not to be caught off guard.

Imagine the following events happening at once; new daily schedule, reorganised office space, new riles, and management change. Now think how disruptive it seems to be unloaded at once. Therefore it is never wise to do all things at once and burden everyone, including yourself.

✔ Don’t Forget to Appreciate

Leaders can become so invested in the process of directing and managing that they fail to appreciate or thank their team members when they do good work. But it shouldn’t be like that; take out some time and reflect on the things your people are doing. Start the new day by appreciating them, it not only makes them happy, but they will be encouraged to perform much better in the future.

How to Overcome the Hurdles of Leadership

Leading change can be a lonely experience because you might be the only one with a different opinion. Convincing everyone to look in a new direction and doing something revolutionary has always been difficult. But during these times, you must be determined and not shy away from asking for help.

Being a leader doesn’t mean to figure out everything on your own; leave some room to learn from others who have been through a parallel transition. It will also help you realise how unique your team’s strengths are and how to avoid mistakes.

Staying motivated and resilient are two significant leadership traits. Once you have adopted these, hurdles will not seem that tough to you.

Leave a room for learning while being true to yourself!

Final Thoughts…

Change is constant, it always has been, and we can never be used to it. As a leader, your job is to set a transformational leadership tone in your organisation through change. These strategies will not only improve your organisation’s performance, but eventually, your company might become one of the leading companies in the marketplace.

Leadership in itself is a big task, and when you have to lead your way through change, it becomes even more significant. But a clear vision and determination will make your journey more comfortable!

How Mindfulness Enables Agile Leadership

by Ming Wei | Mar 8, 2021 | Agile Coaching, Leadership And Management

The Responsibility of building a thriving work culture and taking forward all aspects of an organisation together comes under strong leadership. Therefore, the recommendation is that one pay close attention to the leadership style he/she opts for conducting their business. There are different leadership styles like Adaptive Leadership, Servant Leadership, Situational Leadership, Thought Leadership, and Transformational Leadership. However, today’s progressive leaders choose to stress the value of being ‘Agile‘ in the modern business environment.

By taking inspiration from the tech world’s philosophy of ‘Agile development’, this management style allows leaders to be versatile, adaptable and swift in their decisions. The popularity of ‘Agile Leadership’ is seen clearly in its prevalent use in diverse fields. In uncertain environments, sectors such as the military, educational institutions, the automotive industry, and even marketers are all exploring the Agile approach and other alert frameworks for introducing innovative products in the market. The reason is Agile project management has benefitted many businesses, and it’s easy to set up.

Mindfulness: Secret Ingredient to Develop Effective Agile Leadership

Mindfulness is a state of being mindful and present at the moment without being judgmental. It enables one to cease amid the constant inflow of spurs and consciously decide how to act in a specific situation. Mindfulness is undoubtedly a fundamental skill for Agile Leadership for the core values it stresses. Let’s have a look at some of the key principles!

Mindfulness Principles

· Empathy Awareness

Regardless of how advanced technology gets, the human aspect will consistently fill in as a significant part of project management. The inability to adapt to changing circumstances is evident by depending too vigorously on process and tools.

· Focus Motivation

Mindfulness means to be completely present at the moment. Pay close attention to who you are with and what are you doing uninterruptedly. A project manager is in constant collaboration with other team members. They always address new ideas and creative ways to create the best solution while interacting with them. It is impossible for a good scrum master to afford to be anything but mindful. They never reserve themselves like communicating via email or discourage two-way communication. If this happens, there would be no collaboration, meaning no Agile environment.

· Non-judging Understanding

One of the essential assets of your business is your customer. Incorporating them throughout the procedure, whether internal or external customers, can ensure that the end product fits their requirements more effectively.

· Awareness Empathy

Mindfulness and thinking about the present moment and refer to one’s potential to recognise their mind begins to wander and stray. Pulling yourself back into focus and noticing your thought of trail drifting away is a form of awareness in itself. It would be best if you reminded yourself to listen actively and fully engaged in what is being said when you listen to someone. Sometimes, you find yourself judging or trying to think about your response.

Mindfulness Help Leaders Achieve Agile Team Success

For leaders trying to bring forward an Agile team, a few points of concern go a long way in creating their team’s ideal traits and characteristics.

· Purpose

Having a goal motivates members of the team to work tirelessly to achieve the objectives assigned. An Agile team is no better than any other team without a meaningful purpose, but the Agile coach is concerned with imparting this sense of purpose.

· Transparency

As an Agile team is a cross-functional entity with members from different departments working together to achieve the same objective, it is essential to be transparent when sharing information and brainstorming ideas. Sharing ideas and collaborating to generate solutions and improvements is critical to an Agile team.

· Stronger Communication

Efficient Agile teams display positive interactions without obstacles to behaviour. Teams with powerful communication skills can quickly resolve problems and surpass other teams in productivity and high performance. Before a problem develops, an Agile team expects to interact effectively and present challenges. Besides, Agile teams are, by design, built for iterative product creation, so communication is an integral feature of its very existence.

· Faith

Since transparency is vital for building an effective Agile team, trust is another aspect of a team that brings cohesion and dependency. A team will collapse into elements of doubt and anguish without confidence. Trust allows team members, irrespective of possible humiliation and disgrace, to come up with issues that bother them and seek help without any second considerations.

· Consistent Upgrade

To arrive at a fully deliverable product, Agile teams work on a continuous solution-finding cycle. However, precision cannot be achieved until the team can identify and accept deeply rooted insufficiencies and enhance them. The team continually needs room for improvement, even though it has everyone on board.

To cut the story short, Agile, at its core, refers to a set of principles that require a leader to collaborate, show flexibility while trusting others. These principles subsequently lead to deliver something valuable to the whole organisation. Mindfulness helps an Agile leader to create a highly collaborative work environment, and this achievement occurs when you are aware of your emotions, thoughts, and actions. Similarly, a self-aware team capable of efficiently communicating can better support each other in times of change and stress. Not only this, Agile teams can always come up with something creative in times of need.

In other words, Agile is a mindset. Without correct mindfulness, all the different parts of Agile operating can’t be in one place. When teams and their leaders have a strong Agile mindset, a strong aspiration alone is usually enough for a fruitful operating model of Agile to emerge.

Mindfulness- Improving Your Focus, using Agile Methodology 

· Project Strategy

Your team should be clear about its end objective, the worth it holds for the organisation, and how to measure success before any project. You can create a project scope here, but realise that the Agile project management goal is to resolve project changes and add-ons, making it clear that the scope is changeable.

· Product Brainstorming

Your awareness helps you map a complete overview of characteristics that can help you create the result. Consider this as an essential element of the Agile Leadership arrangement phase as, during each sprint, your work squad will form the unique features of the product. At this stage, you will create a complete product backlog, a list of all the deliverables and features that will help form the final product. Later on, when you plan the sprints, your team will easily pull out the backlog.

· Releasing Plan

One implementation date in conventional waterfall project management comes when the whole project has completed. However, when using Agile leadership management in your project, shorter development cycles are used towards each cycle’s end. So, before initiating the project, you will make plans for releases of features, and at the start of every sprint, you will review and revisit the release strategy for that feature.

· Sprint Planning

Before the beginning of each sprint, the investors/stakeholders usually do a sprint planning meeting to know what each individual will accomplish during that sprint period, achieve, and evaluate the tasks according to the sprint. However, it is vital to share the equal load between the team members, enabling them to perform the tasks effectively during the sprint. Also, you will need to note or document your workflow visually for transparency of the team, mutual understanding of the group, and then identification to remove the obstacles.

· Daily Meetups

To help your team achieve their tasks throughout the sprint, call the short-form regular stand-up meetings and measure whether any modifications are needed. Throughout these meetings, every team member will shortly talk about what they have attained before the day and their workable task. Since they are short meetings, these regular meetings’ period shouldn’t be more than 15 minutes. Prolonged problem-solving sessions or an opportunity to discuss general news items are to be part of these sessions.

The Power of Mindfulness Allows Agility

The ability to manage interactions between stakeholders is the power of agility to allow fully engaged clients to deliver products and services that meet their needs, even in the face of volatility, the complexity of uncertainty, and ambiguity.

With its collaborative, service-based approach based on mindfulness and the enhanced intelligence mindfulness allows, an Agile approach needs Agile leadership to be successful. The Agile approach will likely be ineffective without this kind of leadership – either too rigidly adhering to an impractical set of rules or not applying the correct level of discipline.

Perks of Using Agile Leadership

· Higher Productivity

With greater participation and simpler decision-making processes, you can ensure maximum productivity.

· Reduced Risk

In creating a knowledge-sharing learning environment, you are also reducing the risk of operational bottlenecks.

· Focused

Clear direction and focus on the organisation’s business goals and focusing more on the most valuable activities.

· Efficient

To create smarter and more effective teams in terms of gender, nationality, background, and personality, you have to encourage diversity. Managing and understanding the cultural blocks of self-organisation, such as the culture of blaming, the anxiety of being accountable, losing position, unconsciousness, personal agendas; guidance vs command should be a part of guided and practical exercises.

· Help Cope with Uncertainty

Agile leadership helps organisations deal with uncertain situations. Not to mention, change is the only constant in the business world. This belief requires business leaders to adapt to changes quickly, creating an opportunity for a leader’s agility to come to the rescue. Agile team with mindfulness bring new and innovative solutions to embrace the transition successfully.

Mindfulness Fuels Agile Habits

· Upgrade Your Game by Putting Efforts

In some businesses, leaders may also be product owners and play a crucial role in shaping the product. Such leaders must make a product’s development, and success should be their highest priority. They must have some understanding of technology and how industries are transformed. They must have a strong sense of the product characteristics and market needs that would be most valuable for the customers and consumers. Also, leaders/product owners can combine the market knowledge with the engineer’s feedback on the product’s specific features’ technical viability to make a clear development plan.

· Shaping the Product

Under traditional approaches, IT leaders interview the business unit leaders for product development to collect the business requirements, like what new features are needed to develop new software/application? And on which platform the new application will run/work? Product developers need to understand better the technology and how to transform their respective industries.

· Motivate Your Team

For team motivation, we can take the examples of the C-suite and business leaders. They play an essential role as a missionary for the software products they co-develop. They usually hold product owners responsible for the successful rollout of any new announcement/release and its effect on the company. Also, they encourage the IT engineers and product owners to educate their colleagues about the reasons for and benefits of software adoption.

· Think Like A User/Consumer

The product owners must know the needs of the user/consumer, which helps in creating the products/ software. This assists in changing the way the company functions or attracts clients. Senior executives can inspire product developers/owners by asking relevant questions about the product during the product review.

· Test and Learn Approach

Unlike traditional project management, in Agile, you don’t need to do multiple check-ins of the product. Agile project management emphasises a test and learns approach like the release of the minimum feasible product that offers the consumers short term value but can change their concept about the product.

In the last, if you are a product developer or manager, you must have seen organisations embracing Agile values successfully. These values motivate them to do better in their roles.

If you want to change your team members’ mindset, perfect their work practices, not pay attention to the outcomes or result, then adopt Agile leadership management.

How are you going to apply Agile leadership in your team?

When to Play the Role of an Agile Coach or Trainer?

by Krishna Chodipilli | Dec 10, 2020 | Agile Coaching

‘Coaching’ and ‘training’ are two terms which are similar in meaning but quite ambiguous in existence. What do these words mean? Can they be used interchangeably? Is one more desirable than the other? Each of these questions can be debated at length, and the distinction might be difficult to make till one practice as a trainer and a coach. Getting into the skin of the game and experiencing the act of coaching and training will reveal the answers, though not many of us have the opportunity to do so. When we are trained up to become a coach, it is the time to coach someone else to train! Sounds confusing? Let me elaborate on that.

Coaches Need Training

Coaching is an art that needs to be learned and practised, it does not come naturally to us. It is a refined methodology which delivers maximum effectiveness through dedicated and committed practice. Most of us tend to mix up coaching with problem-solving and solution-giving, but coaching is far-stretched from it. It is primarily about ‘listening’ and ‘asking the right questions’ instead of ‘giving answers’. Since it is a learnt behaviour, one needs to learn and practice, which is nothing but getting trained on the subject. So to become a coach you need a trainer, and you can’t be coached to be a coach.

 Trainers Need to be Coached

Coaches who are engaged in training their fellow coaches-to-be are not donning the role of a coach, instead of the role of a trainer in this case, as they cannot merely ‘listen’ and ‘ask questions’ to upskill the participants. If they knew all the answers, they wouldn’t need to be trained to become coaches. A trainer imparts knowledge and skills about a specific realm of activity or engagement which a trainee is unaware or unskilled at. He/she has abundant mastery over the subject matter and can convey his learning (fine-tuned by experience) in a structured and coherent manner. However, some trainers may not have the wherewithal to influence their audiences effectively or format themselves in the ways that would ‘click’ with the trainees at the psychological level. Their skills and competences as a trainer are limited in dealing with scenarios as such, and a different skill set is required to fill the gap, for which the trainer may need to be coached!

To Coach or Train?

Simple, let’s answer these questions:

• You need a CSM certification to improve your skills at work. Will you seek a trainer who offers training in the subject or will you hire a coach to help you out?
• You have difficulties engaging people and leading teams at work and you’d like to be empowered and impact. Who will you approach, a coach or a trainer?

The answers may seem to be interchangeable at the first glance as if one can engage services of either a trainer or a coach in both scenarios. However, it is revealed in the first scenario that one is looking for a particular skill and a latent product (certificate), and he/she needs to acquire the appropriate training to be authorised with specific competence. In the second scenario, the issue one is confronting is what he/she perceives as a problem, which might not be the case or the reason behind it. A coach would be helpful to map one’s behaviour with the environment and allow one to reveal the root cause of the predicament and how to extricate from it. On the contrary, enrolling into a ‘personality development’ course and getting certified may not be as helpful in this case.

Amplifying the Difference

I hope the distinction between a Coach and Trainer is clarified. The differences can be reinforced from the following applications:

• Get a trainer when the skills you want to acquire or develop is clear to you
• Get a coach when the skills you want to acquire or develop is NOT clear to you
• Get a trainer when you seek to achieve an immediate goal that fulfils a particular need
• Get a coach when you DO NOT know what goals to target that fulfils your needs
• Get a trainer when you need a stamp of authority to earn relevance in your community
• Get a coach when you need a stamp of conviction to earn your true relevance in this world
• Get a trainer to train you to become a successful coach
• Get a coach to coach you to become a successful trainer

As an Agile Coach, the trainer gets to don the role of coach and the coach dons the role of trainer. It distils down to mindset, for example, an Agile leader has to don both hats simultaneously in the process of fulfilling the need of the team members. An agile practitioner gets to live in both worlds and transcends between both roles with ease and dexterity. Agile is all about being flexible, adaptive and participative – significant attributes that are vital for a Trainer and Coach of merit to prosper.

The Hobbesian Trap – When to Play the Role of an Agile Coach or Consultant??

by Krishna Chodipilli | Dec 10, 2020 | Agile Coaching, Scrum Training

The 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes had discovered an interesting theory named the ‘Hobbesian Trap’ – when one is gripped by the fear of being attacked, he pre-empts by arming himself, which instils fear on the (would be) ‘attacker’ who in turn upgrades his arsenal. This action escalates the initial fear and forces the ‘defender’ to upscale too, leading to an uncontrolled spiral (the Arms Race). Whilst the analogy may seem off-the-track with Agile and Management, the illusion of the Hobbesian Trap applies to all aspects of human psychology, especially in the realms of coaching and consultancy. When a decision needs to be made between a coach and a consultant, one is put in a dilemma – Who can help the business to improve profitability / produce a higher return on investment / enhance customer satisfaction? The answers to these questions may lead to a spiral of uncertainties. Most business owners face the Hobbesian Trap when it comes to hiring a consultant or a coach, on the sheer premise (or fear) that one is absolutely needed for the business, while having little or no knowledge of what role they play in the company’s growth or what they can help the company to accomplish. The Coach

A Business Coach is a facilitator and enabler. He/she triumphs over your accomplishment and his/her primary job is to enhance and sharpen your skills to ensure you achieve your goals. Coaches work ‘inside out’ – they assist you to develop purposes and reasons, which help to generate desired behaviour in your business. Business coaches also help to address issues with regards to the mind-set or unconsciousness, such as limiting beliefs, fear of unknown and the ‘Imposter Syndrome’. They build a supportive environment with clarified accountability to ensure you follow through your actions to completion. In summary, a coach facilitates you to define your goals for your business and the “plan of action” to achieve them, and he/she stands by you through the process of implementation.

The Consultant

A Business Consultant is a subject matter expert who addresses specific issues to influence your business positively. He/she provides the knowledge, skills and competencies, to analyse your business and propose a solution to the problem, and customises an action plan to implement the solution. A consultant employs his/her extensive experience and knowledge in business planning and strategy to gauge the scalability and direction of your business, course-correct specific domains such as optimising sales and marketing strategies, streamlining systems and processes, reforming organisational structure, and so on. A business consultant brings a fresh opinion, objectively assesses the current state of the business (‘as is’) and helps to shape the target state (‘to be’), creates and implements an action plan to accomplish the business objectives.

Who Do You Need?

The key to unravelling this mystery is to enlist the services of both to support the internal and external mechanisms of your business. That being said, it does not mean that one needs to hire a coach and a consultant – instead, one can be upskilled to step up to either of the two roles with adequate resources. It can be argued that in comparison it is more feasible to be upskilled as a coach than a consultant, as the functionality of the roles suggests. A Coach tends to be more ‘people-centric’ and an Agile Coach operates on the principle of ‘people over processes’, who can be possibly better in understanding this other than the business owner himself?! Of course, the assumption is more appropriate for small enterprises and large organisations would need to engage external coaches to offset bias in work ecology. It is important that the need to be trained as coaches at the Executive level is not dispensed with. It is more to do with people than the task at the senior levels of the organisation, and when it comes to determining a coach/consultant one needs to introspect on three key areas:

• The quality of intrinsic knowledge existing in the business
• The strength and robustness of the support structure on which the business resides
• The quantum and time-sensitivity of the target results

Knowing the difference between a business coach and consultant can help one to avoid the Hobbesian Trap, therefore save costs and avoid disappointing outcomes. Agile enables you to be clear and upfront on the level of knowledge, support and outcome your business desires, and assists you in making the right decision. It obviates you from getting into the trap. It is crucial for one to understand the organisational requirements, and upscale the corporate strategy by deploying an Agile Coach or an Agile Consultant (or get trained as one), or both as per the merit of the situation, to achieve the desired result.

Agile Metrics – What are the Best Metrics?

by Krishna Chodipilli | Dec 10, 2020 | Agile Coaching, Scrum Training

I have been working as an Agile coach for one of the top-tier companies in the world. I want to share my experience working with leaders and teams in regard to Agile metrics. To give a high-level background, one of my clients has adopted the Spotify organisational model — Squads/tribe/chapters and guilds.

FORMING AND TRAINING TEAMS

In the 1st quarter of 2017, I was working an FTSE 100 company, whose objective was Agile adoption and transformation across CIO (more than 2,500 people). We had different domains and subdomains under CIO. A coach was assigned to work with each domain. We started with forming the right teams, doing the right work, and measuring what mattered. The entire 2016 was marked as Wave One — to form the right teams; enable the team members, including the product owner; and train them on Agile principles and values and the basics of Agile (mainly Scrum and Kanban). We also worked on-demand versus delivery management in parallel with forming the teams.

After our teams and workflow system were in place, we worked on capturing the Agile metrics. We agreed to capture the velocity, story points, burn-down/burn-up charts, defect trends, throughput, and cycle time as a few of the key metrics. The Agile Wave One was completed in January 2017, when we (55 coaches across the globe) had finished training 2,500 team members on Agile adoption and implementation.

During the reflection/relearning session from Wave One, we were clear on the metrics we were capturing for the end of each sprint. Leaders were keener on getting the metrics that rolled up into their respective tribes, subdomains, and domains but had no clue on how to interpret the numbers. And leaders were also trying to compare the velocity across squads and tribes; it was just a numbers game at the end of each sprint.

CAPTURING AND COMMUNICATING METRICS

I was interested in discussing with the squads what we should measure. Was measuring velocity and story points helping the squads get better? And did they receive feedback from management on the metrics the squads submitted at the end of each sprint?

The outcome of the metrics discussions was that the squads felt that it was not about measuring the velocity for each sprint that mattered; it was more important to study the trend of the velocity for each squad and analyze the variations/deviations, which would help the team get better and course correct. They concluded that the trend analysis should be done at the individual squad level and not compare the metrics with other squads. A few team members also felt that velocity was more of a predictable number, and the real measure was the value delivered to the customer at the end of the sprint. There should also be a benefits realization of the work done by the team (i.e., Product is responsible for cascading the value and benefit realization to the squad).

KEY METRICS

Metrics are used to measure four key aspects: people, customer, financial, and process. Then balance your metrics among outcome, process, and behaviour.

People: Team morale or team satisfaction; attrition rate or skills gap

Customer: End-user satisfaction or number of defects

Financial: Unit cost per transaction or total cost of whole operations

Process: Throughput or cycle time; the size of the backlog

Takeaway: Don’t focus solely on the numbers. Observe trends. Plot the data over time to determine whether there’s an improvement or fallback.

It is not always about metrics, metrics that matter to the team. Rest all is nonsense!

It is vital that metrics be maintained daily or weekly, and that you are consistent in the way you measure them.

Keep the metric simple: Measure only what matters, not more.

Make big visual charts of the key metrics, and put them up on the walls for viewing.

Leadership Tribe has been helping organisations in their transformation journey and we are here for you. Contact us directly and we can have a quick discussion over a cuppa to support your Agile Transformation.