2020 DoingAgileRight

• (Rigby et al., 2020) ⇒ Darrell Rigby, Sarah Elk, and Steve Perez. (2020). “Doing Agile Right: Transformation Without Chaos.” Harvard Business Review Press. ISBN:163369870X

Subject Headings: Agile Methodology.

Cited By

• http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%222020%22+Doing+Agile+Right

Quotes

Book Overview

For decades, business leaders have been painfully aware of the huge chasm between their aspiration for a nimble, flexible enterprise and the [[reality of silos, sluggishness, and frustrated innovation. Today, Agile is being hailed as the essential bridge across that chasm. Agile, say its enthusiasts, can transform your company, catapulting you to the head of the pack.

Not so fast. In this clear-eyed and indispensable book, Bain & Company thought leader and HBR author Darrell Rigby and colleagues Sarah Elk and Steve Berez provide a much needed reality check. They dispel the myths and misconceptions that have accompanied Agile's growth — the idea that it can reshape your organization all at once, for instance, or that it should be used in every function and for all types of work. They affirm and illustrate that Agile teams can indeed transform the work environment, make people's jobs more rewarding, and turbocharge innovation — but only if the method is fully understood and implemented the right way.

The key, they argue, is balance. Every organization must optimize and tightly control some of its operations. At the same time, every organization must innovate. Agile, done well, frees and facilitates vigorous innovation without sacrificing the efficiency and reliability essential to traditional operations. Some of the topics covered in Doing Agile Right include:

How Agile Really Works

Agile Planning, Budgeting and Reviewing

Agile Organization, Structures and People Management

Agile Processes and Technology

Scaling Agile

Agile Leadership

Agile in Organizational Crises

Doing Agile Wrong

The (Un) balanced Company

Agile isn't a goal in itself; it's a means to the end of a high-performance, innovative operation. Doing Agile Right is the must-have guide for any organization trying to make the transition — and for those already there, a way to avoid or recover from its potential pitfalls.

Introduction: The Unbalanced Company

Agile — the business philosophy that relies on fast-moving, self-managing teams for innovation—has officially entered the main- stream of corporate management. Tour almost any large company these days and you will find scores of agile teams working to improve customer experiences and business processes. John Deere has used agile methods to develop new machines, USAA to transform its customer service, and 3M to run a major merger integration. Bosch — a global supplier of technology and services with more than 400,000 associates — has adopted agile principles to guide a step-by-step reshaping of the company. Digital natives such as Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify have incorporated agile methods into a wide range of innovation activities. Meanwhile, agile has virtually taken over IT departments, themselves the source of countless innovations. At last count, 85 percent of software developers use agile techniques in their work.1

The reasons for agile’s rapid spread are neither obscure nor surprising. Most big companies find it difficult to innovate. They are weighted down by the structures and procedures of bureaucracy. Agile liberates the innovative spirit that so many organizations stifle. It helps companies reshape both what they offer their customers and how they operate internally. It transforms the work environment, making people’s jobs more rewarding.

These are grand claims, but the data support them. Study after study find conclusively that agile teams are far more successful at innovation than teams that work in traditional fashion. Improvements come rapidly and at less expense. Satisfaction and engagement among employees rise. Moreover, companies can implement agile without the need to spin off separate business units or hide skunkworks from hierarchies. They can deploy agile teams in any business or function that might benefit from them, including corporate headquarters. Once they have learned the basics, they can scale agile, establishing hundreds of individual teams or teams of teams to tackle large projects. Saab’s aeronautics business created more than one hundred agile teams operating across software, hardware, and fuselage for its Gripen fighter jet—a $43 million item that is certainly one of the most complex products in the world. IHS Jane’s has deemed the Gripen the world’s most cost-effective military aircraft.

So agile is spreading, and agile teams are mostly achieving their objectives. It looks like encouraging progress toward an appealing vision. Is there anything wrong with this picture? Certainly there’s nothing wrong with the basic idea. We are business consultants, and we have seen the power and potential of agile in hundreds of companies around the globe. We have helped many of these companies implement agile. We count ourselves among its biggest fans.

But as with so many good ideas, the practice sometimes belies the promise. Agile has spread so rapidly that it threatens to spin out of control. Along with the companies that use it effectively are those that misunderstand or misuse the ideas. They may be egged on by some zealot who promises the world. They may sign on to an agile transformation before they know anything about what such an effort might entail. They may use agile terminology to camouflage distinctly nonagile objectives.

The outcome of these misuses in many companies is chaos rather than constructive change. But the damage is greater than any one company’s experience. When agile is done wrong, it almost always leads to lousy results. Lousy results lead to nervous customers, dissatisfied employees, activist investors, and a push to replace the management team. Replacement managers are understandably skeptical of any strategies that got the prior regime fired. They are likely to clean house, disband agile teams, and (probably) launch a round of layoffs. It’s a version of Gresham’s law: bad agile drives out good. If that happens too often, agile will be discredited—and the business world will be back where it started, with top-heavy bureaucratic corporations struggling hopelessly to keep up with brash upstarts and rapidly changing markets.

So in this book we want to bring agile down to Earth, to separate Agile Done Right from Agile Done Wrong. Here, in the introduction, we’ll focus on the wrongheadedness, the potholes and pitfalls, the ways in which companies have already misunderstood or misused agile. We hope that the lessons and cautionary tales will inoculate you against the idea that agile is some kind of magic quick fix. But we’ll also introduce some of the ideas that inform the chapters that follow—chapters that will tell you how to do agile right. We’ll provide a roadmap to these chapters, and we’ll summarize the research that underlies the book. Doing agile right may take more time and experimentation than doing it wrong—but it’s the only way to get the results that the philosophy promises.

Doing Agile Wrong

In the movie The Princess Bride, the swordsman Inigo Montoya famously chides the cunning Vizzini, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” So it is with agile. Executives often fail to understand how agile operates and where and why it has succeeded. That doesn’t stop them from throwing around the terminology or from making assumptions about agile that simply aren’t true.

Some of these misunderstandings reflect the fact that agile methods — especially those relating to expanding the scope and scale of agile innovation teams — are still relatively new, and many business leaders haven’t yet learned much about them. It’s common to hear, for example, that agile is great but only for technology-based innovations and the IT departments that generate those innovations. This will come as news to National Public Radio, which used agile methods to create new programs; to the people developing the Gripen fighter jet or Haier’s home appliances; and to the many companies using agile to reshape their supply chains. Historically, to be sure, agile has spread most rapidly in IT. But it is widely and successfully used in many other contexts, some of which have only minor technology-based components.

Other failings, though we hate to say it, reflect a measure of cynicism on the part of corporate leaders. Consider the clever press release that Edward S. Lampert, CEO of Sears, issued in 2017: “In addition to the cost reduction target announced today, we continue to assess our overall operating model and capital structure to become a more agile . . . and innovative retailer focused on member experience.”2 Agile in this context is a euphemism for layoffs. And Lampert isn’t alone. Every month we receive more requests for proposals that begin something like this: “The project objective (should you choose to accept it) is to reduce operating expenses by 30 percent this year while transforming the organization to agile ways of working and digital technology.”

The issuers of these requests don’t understand that there are basic inconsistencies between large, chaotic layoffs and agile. For one thing, large layoffs tend to happen in batches driven by precipitous restructurings or annual budgeting cycles. This is diametrically opposed to the continuous learning and adaptation processes prescribed by agile. For another, senior executives typically go behind closed doors to plan the layoffs, emerging with new structures and fixed targets. This is inconsistent with the agile principle of empowering people closest to the work to identify improvement opportunities. Worst of all, leaders who try to marry agile with layoffs inadvertently role-model antiagile behaviors. They create predictive, command-and-control events rather than agile, test-and-learn cultures. Moreover, research shows that large layoffs increase risk aversion and slow innovation. People scramble to learn new jobs. They battle for control of key operations, no matter what the organization chart says. They do everything possible to make sure they will have a chair next year, when the music is likely to stop once again. Mostly, they try to do the same things they know how to do but with fewer people. This is not an environment in which agile can flourish.

But then there is a different kind of wrongheadedness, not generated by complete ignorance or cynicism. These misuses are propagated by well-meaning agile partisans. They are sold to leadership teams who badly want their companies to become nimbler and more innovative but who don’t really understand how agile operates. In our work with hundreds of companies launching thousands of agile initiatives, we commonly find three toxic mistakes. Agile, Agile, Everywhere

References

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	Author	volume	Date Value	title	type	journal	titleUrl	doi	note	year
2020 DoingAgileRight	Sarah Elk Darrell Rigby Steve Perez			Doing Agile Right						2020