Three Agile Strategies That Will Make A Strong Impact

The impact of something dropping into water, with splashes and ripples, representing agile strategies making an impact on a business
Impact by Walter-Wilhelm

Much of my recent writing about Strategy Deployment has been driven by the idea that Agility is a strategy while Agile is a Tactic. However, Agility is a very broad topic, and can easily slip into being a buzzword or platitude. In other words Bad Agile. This suggests that there are some more useful Good Agile strategies.

When I blogged about deploying strategies as choices I suggested that the Agile Manifesto could be interpreted as a set of strategies. They looked like this.

  • Enabling individuals and interactions even over common processes and tools
  • Developing working software even over providing comprehensive documentation
  • Collaborating with customers even over sticking to contractual obligations
  • Responding to change even over keeping to planned commitments

More recently, I’ve been wondering whether there is a better way of describing agile strategies in order to emphasise the core challenges that agile is addressing. That took me back to the Kanban Thinking Impacts that I described as part of the Kanban Thinking model I created. Those impacts are Flow, Value and Potential.

Flow

A “Flow” strategy is one which focuses on “doing the work right”. This involves organising people into cross-functional teams who can collaborate to deliver work quickly. In other words, work flows through teams rather than people being allocated to work. Further, this can mean a shift from an annual planning cycle where people juggle multiple short-lived initiatives. Instead, there are more frequent and dynamic investments in long-lived value streams. As a result, the business is able to respond to unforeseen challenges and take advantage of unanticipated opportunities.

Using the even-over format, I would describe this as a choice to “Organise for fast flow of change even over long-term certainty of plans“.

Value

A “Value” strategy is one which focuses on “doing the right work”. This involves structuring the work to be able to continuously understand and meet customer needs. As a result, there is usually a shift from projects to products. Projects often try to optimise the cost of work through separate technical or architectural solutions. Conversely, products try to optimise the benefits of the work by collectively prioritising collaborative solutions. As a result, products can be continuously validated and evolved to deliver what is most important to customers. After all, increasing value is infinite while reducing cost is zero-bounded.

Using the even-over format, I would describe this as a choice to “Maximise the value of products even over minimising the cost of projects“.

Potential

A “Potential” strategy is one which focuses on “doing the work sustainably”. This involves working in a way which enables long-term adaptability and learning. As a result, there is a shift from cutting corners and short-term solutions to building quality in and long-term investments. By creating fast feedback cycles, teams can learn more about their products and services and how they are being used. Further, that feedback enables people to have autonomy, mastery and purpose in their work which creates more potential in them. To paraphrase an expression used by Toyota, build people in order to build products.

Using the even-over format, I would describe this as a choice to “Create feedback for long-term potential even over making short-term gains“.

It should be obvious that these three strategies work together. Achieving flow requires organising around value, and delivering value requires achieving flow. Both require building long-term potential. However, they each emphasise something different and important in terms of organising for flow, delivering products of value, and creating potential through feedback.

These three strategies are just the way I think about the core challenges that Agile is addressing. Let me know if you have different strategies and what they leverage.

TASTE Impacts, Outcomes and Outputs

As part of preparing material for the Agendashift and X-Matrix Masterclass I’m running with Mike Burrows next month, I started thinking about how the idea of Impact, Outcome and Output (that blog is from 2012) could be overlaid onto the TASTE approach. Back then I described the relationship between them as:

Outputs create Outcomes which have Impact

Give the outcome-oriented perspective of Agendashift, we can reverse this and rewrite it as:

Impact is a result of Outcomes which are generated by Outputs

We can then map Impact, Outcomes and Outputs onto TASTE by breaking Outcomes into long term, medium term and short term as follows.

  • True North – the Impact we want to have
  • Aspirations – the long term Outcomes we hope to achieve
  • Strategies – the medium term Outcomes we hope to achieve
  • Evidence – the short term Outcomes we hope to achieve
  • Tactics – the Outputs we want to deliver

Obviously that breaks the Acronym slightly, but the model is still the same.  We can see this by overlaying onto the X-Matrix Template

This seems like a useful way of framing the relationships between the various elements of the model and I’m looking forward to exploring and experimenting with the idea during the masterclass.

Tickets are still available if you’d like to be part of the experience and can get to Brighton for October 9-11. And you might as well stick around for Lean Agile Brighton the following day! 

Making an Impact with Kanban Thinking

This post pulls together a number of ideas  on impact into a single place, and will become the content for a page in Impact on the Kanban Thinking site.

What is Impact

Outputs creates Outcomes which have Impact.

Designing a Kanban System involves the evolution and discovery of a good design. It cannot be pre-determined in advance. Thus instead of defining a future-state and working towards it, we start with the current-state and work away from it, exploring and assessing different alternatives. Each output of a design iteration will create different outcomes, and those that improve the system can be said to have a positive impact, while those that worsen the system have a negative impact.

Impact, therefore, describes the disposition of the system, or its tendency to behave in a certain way. Rather than defining a planned destination, impact points to the desired direction, such that we can check whether any changes are moving us towards or away from the direction we want to be heading. Impact can be assessed by using narrative techniques to capture stories about utopian (and dystopian) futures, and subsequently asking whether an outcome is likely to lead to more of the positive stories and fewer of the negative stories.

Describing Impacts

When imagining what impacts would be desirable, its easy for our experiences and biases to lead us to narrow our thinking and prematurely converge on only one particular type of impact. To avoid this, and encourage diversity in exploring a wide variety of potential impacts, Kanban Thinking describes three types to consider, giving different perspectives.

  • Flow. This is Doing the Thing Right. Stories will be primarily related to the process, efficiency and reliability.
  • Value. This is Doing the Right Thing. Stories will be primarily related to the product, effectiveness and validity.
  • Potential. This is Doing the Thing Sustainably. Stories will be primarily related to people, euphoria and flexibility.

Impacts as Triads

When exploring the impacts, it will become apparent that there is not always an obvious and neat mapping to either flow, value or potential. Thus, the three impacts can be thought of as a triad, with each being a vertex of a triangle.

Triads are concept I learned from Dave Snowden and used by the Cognitive Edge Sensemaker Suite (note that they have a patent associated with this), where a triangle is used as a measuring instrument to assess against three parameters. By using triads, impacts can be placed relative to where they have the strongest affinity, without having to decide on any one in particular. Imagine an impact being connected to each vertex with elastic. The greater the affinity to a vertex, the greater the tension, with the final position being a result of the combination of all three. Thus the story in the triad below has the strongest affinity with the Flow vertex. The next strongest is Potential, with Value being the weakest.

Impact Triad

While triads are an approach not directly supported by the canvas in its current form, the deliberate choice of words to describe each impact creates multiple possible triads which could be explored. Deciding where an impact goes generally requires more thinking, and generates greater dialogue and insight.

FlowValuePotential
Thing RightRight ThingThing Sustainably
ProcessProductPeople
ReliabilityValidityFlexibility
EfficiencyEffectivenessEuphoria

Generating lots of utopian (and dystopian) future stories, instrumented with these triads, will generate patterns which can give a sense of where the improvement opportunities are for making an impact.

Example

Here’s an example of thinking about impact from the three perspectives. It is intentionally lacking in direct relevance to minimise the risk of biasing your own answers to the questions.

When I go running, I’m generally wanting to improve my health and fitness. What impact do I want to have?

  • From a Flow perspective, impact could be about pace and speed. I could imagine a utopian future where I can run a 4 minute mile.
  • From a Value perspective, impact could be about distance and stamina. I could imagine a utopian future where I can run 100 miles.
  • From a Potential perspective, impact could be about friendship and community. I could imagine a utopian future where I am the president of a local running club.

None of these are mutually exclusive. If I can run a 4 minute mile, then there is a high likelihood that I’ll be involved in a running club, and training longer distances as well. However, explicitly exploring the different perspectives avoids me just focussing on one thing such as speed, to the detriment of friendship or stamina.

What stories would you like to tell about the impact your kanban system makes in the future?

Anatomy of the Kanban Canvas

I’ve just added a high level explanation of the anatomy of the Kanban Canvas to the main Kanban Thinking site (where you can downloade the Canvas). I thought I would also post it here.

System

How to assess the systemic problem and who is experiencing it.

At the centre of the Canvas is the system being worked on.

Assuming that the current situation is not perfect, and there is always room for improvement, then understanding the scope of the system helps focus on the biggest opportunities for improvement and avoids “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”. By thinking about the situation as part of a holistic system, and having clarity on the scope of the system, we are more likely to identifying opportunities which improve the whole, rather than making smaller, local improvements, which might worsen the whole.

This leads to the question of what is the scope of the system. Defining the system to be too small, might not lead to any significant improvements. Equally defining the system to be too large, might be like trying to “boil the ocean”.

One way of understanding the system is to look at the people involved, and explore what problems those people are having. Narrative is an extremely useful form of doing this – finding and telling stories about people’s experiences and frustration with their work. In particular, the stories related to the customers and stakeholders will start to identify the boundaries of the system.

One fun way of exploring the system through narrative is by using the Pixar Pitch. This approach makes the final “Because of that…” refer to the current kanban system design, and the “Until Finally…” is left blank to be explored in the Impact section.

Impacts

How to assess the fitness criteria in terms of flow, value and potential.

The three arrows coming out of the right of the central System are potential Impacts which might be made. These Impacts encourage a focus on what success or failure could look like, before any changes get made.

Given that in most situations, we are dealing with complex problems, where cause and effect are only apparent with hindsight and past solutions are not necessarily repeatable in the future, then we should not try to define a specific future state to solve the problem. However, that does not mean that we cannot determine the characteristics of the outcomes of solutions so we can assess their fitness criteria, or how fit for purpose a solution is.

Impact is an evaluation of fitness for purpose. A successful solution is one which has positive impact and an unsuccessful solution is what which has negative (or no) impact. Impact can be thought of as direction, as opposed to a point solution being a specific destination.

Having explored the scope of the System through narrative, we can also begin to define Impact in a similar way by asking what stories do we want to hear more of, or less off, in the future. When using the Pixar Pitch technique, imaging impossible good and bad endings to the story brings out exaggerated scenarios which can be compared against by asking whether the System is becoming more or less like the suggested endings. Getting both good and bad endings allows both positive and negative Impact to be easily imagined and identified.

When imagining the future, to create a range of diverse possibilities, the Impacts on Flow, Value and Potential are used to encourage thinking from different perspectives.

Interventions

How to assess the evolutionary potential in terms of studying, sharing, stabilising, sensing and searching.

The five arrows going into the left of the System are the potential Interventions that could be made. These Interventions provide a frame for appreciating the intent behind various practices, learning and discovering which ways of working are the right ones for the current situation, and transforming those practices as the system continuously evolves.

Working through the interventions encourages continuous curiosity about which tools and techniques to use, understanding when and why they are appropriate, and ultimately collaboratively, co-creating an initial kanban system as a baseline to begin experimenting and improving.

The interventions used are to Study the context, Share the understanding, Stabilise the work, Sense the capability and Search the alternatives.

Kanban Thinking Questions

Question MarkQuestions

Kanban Thinking emerged from a realisation that “best practices” are not universal, and that sometimes, continuing to try harder, do better and have more discipline isn’t the right thing to do when those practices are not appropriate. As a result, the challenge became one of how to help people learn and discover their own solutions to the challenges they face when pre-packaged solutions don’t work. The result, Kanban Thinking, is a mental model that guides my thinking, and gives me a framework with which to ask questions when designing kanban systems. This post describes Kanban Thinking in terms of some basic questions.

The System

The starting point is to understand why we are designing a kanban system.

  • What systemic problem, difficulty or frustration are we trying to address?

Impacts

Next we consider how we will know whether the kanban system is doing its job.

Flow

Improving the progress of the work might be a positive impact.

  • How would investing in our process, its efficiency and reliability make a difference?

Value

Improving the product of the work might be a positive impact.

  • How would investing in our product, its effectiveness and validity make a difference?

Potential

Improving the sustainability of the work might be a positive impact.

  • How would investing in our people, their euphoria and humanity make a difference?

Heuristics

Then we evaluate what interventions we might make to begin evolving the kanban system.

Study

Studying the context allows a better understanding of the current situation.

  • What could be done to learn more about customer and stakeholder needs, the resultant demand, and how that demand is processed?

Share

Sharing the knowledge gives everyone a common understanding of the situation.

  • What information is important to share, and how can tokens, the inscriptions on them, and their placements, provide a single visual model?

Contain

Containing the work, with loose constraints, creates a stable, yet supple system.

  • What policies could help limit work in process, and remove unnecessary or unexpected delays or rework?

Sense

Sensing the current capability provides understanding of how well the system is performing.

  • What measures and meetings might create insights and guide decisions on the interventions required to have the desired impact?

Explore

Exploring possible interventions leads to discovery of the evolutionary potential of the system.

  • What small experiments could be run to safely learn the impact of different interventions?

Answers

There are not necessarily any right or wrong answers to these questions. The intent is that they should lead to dialogue and conversations, which themselves lead to awareness and ideas for how to go about change and improvement.

How do these questions help you? Let me know!

Heuristics for Building the Right Thing

On Monday I had the privilege of spending the day with some really smart people. Organised by Gojko Adjic, other attendees included Chris Matts, Henrik Kniberg, Mary and Tom Poppendieck, Gabby Benefield, Jeff Patton, Aaron Sanders and Olaf Lewitz.

The theme of the day was exploring how we can help organisations not just build the “thing right”, but build the “right thing”. We spent the morning sharing and exploring the various techniques we used, such as Story Mapping, Impact Mapping, Effect Mapping, Feature Injection, Real Options and Lean Canvas. We then moved onto more general discussion on the problem we are trying solve, before focussing back in on putting something together to try and articulate the commonalities we had found and create a platform to continue the conversation and try and make an impact ourselves.

Henrik has already blogged one statement summarising our conclusions.

Great results happen when:

  • People know why they are doing the work
  • Organisations focus on outcomes and impacts rather than features
  • Teams decide what to do next based on immediate and dircet feedback from the use of their work
  • Everyone cares

Another output was what I called “Heuristics for Building the Right Thing”. I mentioned heuristics in relation to Kanban Thinking, and again, the goal was to provide enough guidance for people to learn, without constraining to specific solutions or techniques. We started by brainstorming ideas and then grouped those into 5 themes, before putting some action-focussed words describe the themes. We noticed that there was a general feedback loop that the heuristics formed, and that there was a missing heuristic that was central to everything. Thus we ended up with:

  • Understand your customer
  • Be Comfortable with Ambiguity
  • Co-Create
  • Learn Fast
  • Make an Impact
  • Make it Visible

IMG_1222 IMG_1221

Kanban Values, Impacts and Heuristics

A recent thread discussing the values behind kanban on the kanbandev mailing list inspired a couple of great blog posts by Mike Burrows on “Introducing Kanban Through Its Values” and “Kanban: Values Understanding And Purpose“, which have in turn inspired me make some updates to the Kanban Thinking model.

The key points for me in Mike’s second post are these. First,

We often say what the Kanban method is (an evolutionary approach to change) without saying what it is actually for! Change what? To what end?

and then,

The Kanban method is an evolutionary approach to building learning organisations.

Impact

I have a different take on the values discussion and how they help answer the question “to what end?” I’ve come to the view that articulating values is not a useful exercise because they often end up being things that anyone could espouse. One alternative is to use narratives and parables to describe the values in action. With Kanban Thinking, I prefer to talk about the desired impacts of a kanban system. Knowing what impact we want the kanban system to have, and how to measure that impact, will inform our system design decisions.

Thus, in answer to the question “to what end?”, Kanban Thinking suggests 3 impacts; improved flow (demonstrated in terms of productivity, predictability or responsiveness), increased value (demonstrated in terms of customer satisfaction, quality or productivity) and unleashed potential (demonstrated in terms of employee satisfaction, quality or responsiveness).

Heuristics

Mike suggests that the purpose of a kanban system is to learn, and in light of the above, that would be to learn how best to have maximum impact. Up until now, I have talked about five leverage points (or levers) on a kanban system, with Learn being one of those levers. As a result of the insights I had from Mike’s post I have switched to referring to those five elements as heuristics rather than levers, with the fifth heuristic changed from Learn to Explore.

This is one definition of heuristic:

involving or serving as an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experimental and especially trial-and-error methods.

and

of or relating to exploratory problem-solving techniques that utilize self-educating techniques (as the evaluation of feedback) to improve performance

Thus, the five (updated) heuristics of Study, Share, Limit, Sense and Explore help with the learning about a kanban system in order to have the desired impacts of improved Flow, increased Value and unleashed Potential.

Exploration is a more active description of what I originally intended by Learning as a then lever. Exploration requires curiosity (another value suggested by Mike) and experimentation to try things out, observe the results, and amplify or dampen accordingly.

That leaves the updated Kanban Thinking model looking like this:

IMG_0065

A Review of Impact Mapping

I mentioned that I had a great conversation with Gojko Adzic at Lean Agile Scotland. During that discussion, Gojko also described a technique he call Impact Mapping. Since then has published a short book on Impact Mapping which I highly recommend.

An Impact Map can be thought of as a structured mind map, with the following levels being used to articulate the various aspects of an initiative:

  1. Why – The central node describes the goal of the initiative in a quantative manner such that it can be measured.
  2. Who – These are the people who can either be a help or a hindrance in achieving the goal.
  3. How – These are impacts that need to be had on the actors for them to either help achieve the goal, or minimise/avoid them being a hindrance.
  4. What – These are the deliverables which are hoped will create the impact on the actors to achieve the goal.

There are a number of reasons I like the approach and find it coherent with my experiences.

  • Impact Maps build on Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle, which I have written about in the past. The additional Who level helps bridge the gap and identify the different Hows .
  • Impact Maps also provides a framework against which to iterate and increment using story maps, feature injection and fidelity. In particular, having the SMART goal means that the development is more likely be stopped at the right time because the the deliverables have had the desired impact, or because they are not having the anticipated impact. Alternatively, development might even be avoided because alternative deliverables are identified which will generate enough impact to achieve the goal.
  • The language of Impact Maps is very close the language I use of Impacts, Outcomes and Outputs. For me, the Why is the Impact – it is the overall impact we want the initiative to have. The Who remains the people who can help or hindering achieving the Impacts. The How are the Outcomes which will help the actors achieve the Impact (or minimise/avoid hindrance), and the What are the Outputs required to create the Outcomes.

Regardless of the subtle differences of language, its still a great technique, and is one I’m looking forward to using in the future.

The Flow Impact

As I wrote yesterday about some upcoming Rallying adventures, I get to work on some exciting projects. A recent one is the “Agile for Business” book which is being put together in an iterative and incremental manner. Bob Gower, who is spearheading the initiative, wrote a blog post last month about the background to the book.

One of my contributions will be a short piece on flow, one of the three impacts I describe in Kanban Thinking. I am reproducing the current version below, although the final version may well change.

Flow is the result of doing the thing right. It is the regular and smooth progress of work from its initial concept to its final consumption.

Work that progresses in large chunks, in a stop-start manner, does not have flow. It’s the work that progresses in small pieces, in a continuous manner, that ultimately creates the kind of flow your organization needs. By reducing completion time and enabling greater predictability and reliability, it’s this kind of work that builds trust and fosters creativity and innovation. Moreover, reducing utilization and creating spare capacity, sometimes referred to as slack, allows a greater ability to respond to changes and surprises. After all, we don’t run our servers at 100%, and we know how well traffic flows on a grid-locked road! This spare capacity is what gives us time to spend on continuous improvement and innovation.

Working on smaller and fewer pieces of work helps minimize delays and generate faster feedback. Think about a slow, sluggish cargo tanker compared to a fast and nippy speedboat. Further, balancing demand against capability, and not starting more work than you can complete, means that work isn’t left hanging around and depreciating. Imagine the pileup caused by trying to push a chain of paperclips across a table versus the smooth flow created by pulling them across.

So how does an organization go about actually achieving flow? Focus on progressing and completing a smaller number of smaller pieces of work. Make that work, and its flow, visible in a physical shared place, and when work becomes blocked, encourage teams to resolve issues and concentrate on finishing it rather than starting something new. When aspects of the workflow are identified which mean that the work does not progress as quickly and smoothly as you would like, invest time in improving the workflow in order to develop future capability.

While this may appear to reduce the amount of time one is kept busy, it’s important to remember that busyness and productivity are not the same thing.

Measuring activity, in terms of utilization, will not create great results. Instead of focussing on the worker, focus on the work product, and measure work outcomes by things like throughput for productivity, lead-time for responsiveness, and due-date performance for reliability. These are all appropriate measures of flow.

Stop starting, and start finishing.

From Capability to Potential

At Lean Agile Scotland last weekend I was chatting with Gojko Adzic over dinner, and one of the many topics we covered was whether capability was the right word for one of the three impacts I describe as desirable with Kanban Thinking. Earlier this year I described what I meant by capability, but more recently I’ve realised capability is more commonly referenced as a property of the whole system, rather than one specific impact. In other words, if we improve a system’s flow, we have improved the system’s overall capability. Thus I needed to find a new word.

When I referred to capability as an impact, my goal was to ensure as much emphasis was placed on the people who are doing the work, as was on the work itself and its process. This emphasis is what enables a system’s performance to be sustainable over the long term, and even to improve over time. I had been toying with sustainability, but Gojko suggested the word potential and the more I think about it, the more I like it. Potential can be defined as the “possible, as opposed to the actual”, and what is “capable of being or becoming”. This clearly describes that improving a system’s potential is improving the long term future of that system.

Another way of looking at it is the metaphor of a pipe, again inspired by Gojko. If value is what comes out of the pipe, and flow is the progress through the pipe, potential is what can go into the pipe. A system which has a positive impact on potential is one which opens the tap to allow more to be done.

IMG_0031

Then there is also the notion of human potential. Bob Marshall referred to this, and specifically to the waste of human potential, in his Lean Agile Scotland session on Rightshifting, further reinforcing the notion. I also noticed that Matt Wynne has referred to the same waste in his blog post following the conference. This has a nice synergy and helps reinforce the idea that increasing a system’s potential is not about cracking the whip harder. Rather it is about investing in people, unleashing their creativity, and making work fun.

As a result, the latest Kanban Thinking model now looks likes this.

IMG_0032