Agile Processes

It was never intended to use agile processes to develop software faster or make more software (increase of efficieny). Instead the intention was to organize the work in a way helpful to reach a goal that is beneficial to the company, its employees and also delights customers - regardless whether the work is related to making software or other activities around it.

Companies and teams within companies change by applying agile processes. How they create value can be described as several stages. It starts with just a good understanding of value creation and probably goes all the way up to the ability to discover/create new markets.

Understanding value creation

Teams understand value creation within the company. They start to view their own work in relationship to their contribution to company success and begin to report work progress in terms of value created.

Investment: The introduction of Scrum or Kanban allows teams to gain insight. Teams learn to understand how their own activities are interconnected with tasks and activities elsewhere within the company and they start to discover potential for cross-functional collaboration within the team.

Contribution to value creation

Teams contribute directly to the value creation of the company once they produce solutions supportive to the business purpose - they do it frequently, explicitly and goal-oriented. The solutions they deliver show high technical quality and are exceptionally suitable for the purpose they are made for.

Investment: Technical team coaching improves the abilities of all team members. However, until the abilities of all team members have improved and new technical capabilities of the team have developed the team's productivity may decrease temporarily.

Improvement of value creation

Teams that have developed their own technical abilities and also gained industry competence and are knowledgeable about the market they operate in can improve the creation of value.

Investment: To grow industry competence and have teams able to make sensible decisions about how to improve value creation it is necessary to provide them with opportunities to do so and also have the right mix of generalizing specialists on the team. A prerequisite is the willingness of everybody on every level within the company to learn how to effectively organize cross-functional collaboration.

Discover / create new markets

New discoveries are usually not made by following a straight path. Frequently, discoveries are non-intentional and to make them requires a high degree of freedom to experiment and pursue unusual and sometimes stupid ideas.

Investment: Innovation emerges from a company culture that encourages experimentation and permits failure. It is also dependent on the willingness and the ability to have a "long breath" - it may take a while before something groundbreaking is discovered or created.

 

Agility is not easy to acquire. The path to agility is difficult, because many measures and ways of doing something go against inherited value systems, which people hold dear, and against habits and behavior that are based on those value systems. It takes time and many small steps to learn new behavior and accept it. It also takes time to comprehend that the new behavior has less risk and provides benefits.

Agility requires a change of mind, which can only happen in an environment that is full of respect and trust between people. That is why the first steps usually take quite some time to go. A trusted advisor or coach can be very helpful during that fragile early stage of mindset shift!

A network of independent coaches

Economically independent Agile Coaches do not have any motive to put their own interests before the needs of the teams and companies they coach. That's why the term "we" on this website refers to all the coaches in the network I'm a part of. "We" is not used to refer to any full-time employees. In fact there are none. That ensures that as the client you can trust each coach that he/she puts all his/her energy to work on your issues. Plus, you don't have to bother finding a real good or large vendor - you have all the options available to you by tapping into our network.