How Do I Know If Agile Is Working?

“How do I know if Agile is working?” This is a question I’ve been asked a lot recently in one form or another. If not Agile, its Scrum, or Kanban or SAFe or something similar. My usual response is something along the lines of “How do you know of anything is working?” And there generally isn’t a quick and easy answer to that!

I’ve come to the view that Lean and Agile practices and techniques are simply tactics. They are tactics chosen as part of a strategy to be more Lean and Agile. And becoming more Lean and Agile are seen as important to make necessary breakthroughs in performance in order to deliver desired results.

With that perspective, then the answer to “How do I know if Agile is working?” is that you achieve the desired results. That’s probably a long time to wait to find out, however, as it is a trailing measure. It is necessary, therefore, to identify some intermediate improvements which might indicate the results are achievable, and leading measures can be captured to give hat earlier feedback.

The lack of a quick and easy answer to “How do you know if anything is working?” is often because Lean and Agile have been introduced as a purely tactical initiative, without any thought to how they relates to strategy, what measurable improvements they might bring, and how any strategy and improvements will lead to desirable results. In fact very few people (if any) know exactly what those desirable results are!

I’m increasingly trying to work the other way – what the Lean community call Strategy Deployment. For any transformation to work, everybody in the organisation needs to know what results are being strived for, what the strategic goals are that will enable the necessary changes to get there, and what measurable improvements will indicate progress. Then the whole organisation can be engaged in designing and implementing tactical changes which might lead to improvement. Everything becomes a hypothesis and an experiment, which can be tested, the results shared and adjustments made.

In other words, Strategy Deployment leads to organisations becoming laboratories, where Lean and Agile can inform hypothesis on strategies, improvements and tactics. I think its the secret sauce to any transformation, which is why I’ll be talking about it more at various conferences over the rest of the year.

The first one is Agile Cymru in a couple of weeks. There’s a few tickets left, and considering the line-up of speakers, and the ticket cost, its incredible value. I highly recommend going, and I hope to see you there!