This week, we explore the surprising shift away from dedicated teams, a cornerstone of traditional agile practices. Our hosts, Peter and Dave, unpack the challenges organizations face, including resistance to change, disruptive reorganizations, and the ever-present struggle to secure buy-in. We'll also discuss practical strategies to navigate these challenges, emphasizing the importance of incremental steps, clear communication, and building trust.
This week's takeaways:
Join us as we explore how to embrace agile principles and achieve success, even in the face of resistance. We love to hear your feedback! If you have questions or would like to suggest a topic, please feel free to contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com.
This week, we explore the surprising shift away from dedicated teams, a cornerstone of traditional agile practices. Our hosts, Peter and Dave, unpack the challenges organizations face, including resistance to change, disruptive reorganizations, and the ever-present struggle to secure buy-in. We'll also discuss practical strategies to navigate these challenges, emphasizing the importance of incremental steps, clear communication, and building trust.
This week's takeaways:
Join us as we explore how to embrace agile principles and achieve success, even in the face of resistance. We love to hear your feedback! If you have questions or would like to suggest a topic, please feel free to contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com.
Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello, dave, how are you today?
Dave:Excellent, good to talk to you again, peter. How have things been?
Peter:They've been good. It's been a productive couple of weeks. Got a lot of stuff done, so I'm quite glad to be at home and had some time actually to focus on doing some work.
Dave:It's been entertaining and hopefully spending time with the family as well.
Peter:Of course.
Dave:Of course, and I've been. It's interesting we were just I was just chatting to you about this one, but just got back from a quick trip out to Napa Valley just to see friends and have a good time. It was interesting. But, having come back, I'm right in the middle of a leadership course and I just wanted to share something with you, because it still it kind of makes the hairs on the back of my head itch a little bit, which is we were having a conversation around agile adoption and use in many organizations in the market adoption curve.
Dave:And we're very definitely in that late majority space of adoption of agile practices, and one of the things that I have observed is dedicated teams are no longer a given, which is really difficult because we've spent many years talking about how the building block of agility is dedicated, cross-functional teams.
Peter:Yes, and the concept of teams and we've talked about the autonomous teams and the ability for like those structures to exist, because the team structure versus the individual structure as a model where you build your organization from a delivery perspective. Now, yes, so it's interesting. So where was that coming from?
Dave:Well, it's more. To be honest, it was led by myself, as I'm thinking and reflecting on many of the conversations that we're having today versus the conversations we had a few years ago. And, specifically, I can even remember a few years ago talking about one of the first steps being let's look at your organization and realign this around dedicated agile teams aligned to a product or value stream, whatever it may be, and that was sort of the first step and considered something that you can't avoid. You have to go forward with that one. Now, of course, there are practices where you take the organization as it is and you evolve from there. Of course, but if you're kind of going all in on an agile delivery capability, then the agile delivery teams becomes part of the conversation very early on.
Peter:Yeah and maybe not. I mean I should. Maybe this is relate to it. But, like, reorganizing the entire organization is obviously incredibly disruptive and it's almost always done badly and in causes the disruption is often usually not worth the pain. I mean, you hear of organizations that go through multiple reorgs in a year and there's like, and then wonder why if I'm quits, it's the, so that's that side of it there's. But I, as there's this, this concept, that, or agile practices to be easily adopted, we want to create a team, construct that cross functional team that everything can occur within that team and that they can basically handle the delivery of the products that they're developing with all the skill and they have all of the skills necessary to do so Absolutely, and, and I would add to that that both you and I and many practitioners in the space have seen those formed dedicated cross functional agile teams do incredible things like perform and and innovate produce consistent, reliable work of high quality and so on.
Dave:So we've seen the results of that be very, very strong and I think that the realization is that as you go to that that late majority side of the market adoption curve one of the key things is that late adoption of, for example, a natural mindset and natural delivery model is that when you're a late adopter, you want to change nothing at all. You just want to be able to buy and put it on your desk and away it goes, whatever it is.
Dave:And so one of the things that we see is as a very strong pushback on the idea of cross functional teams. There's always reasons around projects and the fact that you can't do this because we need these people in different places, and whereas in the past there was and there was an openness to discuss that, it's getting harder and harder to assume that that will be step one in that process.
Peter:Yeah, and I think some of the reasons I was describing earlier are possibly underlying that. Right, it is disruptive to reorganize everything on to a structure that you may or may not necessarily know if it's going to have the impact that you're expecting it to. So what do we want to do first, to make sure that things are being structured well or that we're. How do we take our first steps in that direction without having to reorganize?
Dave:everything. Yeah, well, and and maybe I shouldn't use the word everything, because one of the things that we're recognizing is even that pilot, that first iterative attempt to making that change, where we put one or two teams together and see how they perform. Even that can be seen as too much, too soon.
Peter:So what do you think is the solution to this?
Dave:Let's go back to when people actually would listen to those change consultants coming in. Perhaps no, I think, joking aside, that it's a realization of the current, you know. First of all, late majority. The nice thing is it's late majority, it's everywhere. So every organization we talk to is aware of agile, and agile becoming an invisible word in the sense that it's already there and we're describing a situation which is already there. That's the one side.
Dave:The downside, of course, is it's diluted in how well it's been implemented for just what we're referencing here, and I think this is one of the things that comes to mind is take the organization where it is and I think that really kind of speaks a lot more to taking I don't want to call it a Kanban approach versus a Scrum approach, but taking a more sort of less, less, just accept the organization where it is and look at performance improvement through understanding the process and identifying where to place energy, and knowing that we're going to eventually move, probably in many cases, towards something that has a structure that looks more around that team structure that we've talked about but may not do.
Peter:Yeah, and I completely agree. I mean now our practice is that we do that as the act go along those lines is look at the organization, see where the right areas to improve is. I can think of one quite recent sort of client engagement where you had two teams. I know they were basically responsible for an end-to-end system, but to reorganize them it became more a question of looking at the systems. It's almost a team topologies type view of it around. Where is the cognitive load? The way that things were initially set up meant that people were standing on each of those toes because there was no clear accountability as to who owned what parts of the system, and so by shuffling a couple of people around and setting the accountabilities to the systems, you now had clear delineation and the teams could now operate much better and they became more cross functional as each individual team.
Dave:Yeah it's. I always find it challenging because we want to get the best for the organization and it's a little bit like you can see a third, fourth and fifth gear and you know how to get into that third, fourth or fifth gear and yet we're playing around with first and second gears and that's okay A manual gear reference that many people may not follow. But basically there's a lot more room for improvement which we can't access while we're staying away from some of those fundamentals around dedicated agile teams.
Peter:Yeah, but you've got to build the trust because otherwise it's absolutely for taking large disruptive pieces like reorganizing everything. You've really got to be coming from a position of extreme trust that this is actually going to make the difference. We're looking to, so being able to have well, also data to back that up, to be able to show it, to be able to say, hey look, this is, this is where you are today and this is, if these are the changes we think would be the next best step in sort of reorganizing and setting things up. And here's what we'll be able to measure this as we go through, and we'll make sure we're putting all the appropriate effort into that change, rather than just, hey, let's throw the cards up in the air and see where they land.
Dave:Well, and I think it isn't about the whole organization, reorganize right, it's about creating understanding like you say, understanding whether the hotspots are where the cognitive load is or whether the product that doesn't meet expectations is being built and delving into that.
Dave:What I find disconcerting is that there are still organized, or there are organizations that that expect a Band-Aid fix without any sort of change in that environment. So so we're not talking about reorging the entire organization. We're talking about looking at that one area and saying, okay, can we maybe dedicate some people to this so we can kind of get a problem solved. And when you aren't even able to get commitment to that level, to your point, it's a mixture of you know how's the trust being built? Is there a we really solving the real problem Is that. That is their desire to go and solve that. And I think that gets a lot more difficult because that's where you really feel your hands are tied. If you're not able to to get some commitment, even in a small area which is recognized as needing attention. There's something more fundamental going.
Peter:Yes, yeah, and you'll only make minimal sort of steps forward. I mean, you'll eventually get to a point where it's like there's no further we can go.
Dave:Well, the value for money for that, for that engagement, is totally slanted in the wrong direction. It's actually the wrong. You know what's? There's not that. There's not much point employing. So, yeah, for example in that place, just because the impact that you can have is severely limited by the constraints that within which you're working.
Peter:Yeah, we've had some conversations about that actually fairly recently. Some clients like you know it's like it's only worth paying us to be here if you're going to be there and engage in the advice and work with us on the change. Otherwise, yeah, there's really not much point in you paying us to be here.
Dave:Absolutely, absolutely. So what would you take out of?
Peter:the conversation, making sure that, from a leadership perspective, there is buy in to make what changes are necessary, that there is becoming a resistance to reorganizing into teams, which is somewhat a fundamental building block from thinking about how we deliver knowledge-based work, and so if we're not able to do that, then we're going to reduce the amount of impact we can have with some of the other practices we might need to or want to build on top of that. So that's kind of some of the fundamental pieces that take away.
Dave:I really, and this is part of why I enjoy these conversations one of the key takeaways. I picked up is being very careful how you present the path forward, because I think part of our conversation was the difference between reorging the entire organization, whatever entire means, versus getting enough leeway to be able to reframe the problem in a small area within the organization. And I think just that simple or use of language can be very off-putting because to your point it's absolutely correct.
Dave:No organization should stick their hand up and volunteer for a disruptive reorg unless they're up against it. I mean, that's the sort of thing where even when you're up against it, there are better ways of doing that change. So how do you not immediately kind of freeze the conversation and engage a fight-or-flight response by challenging that organization is very possibly just as simple as using the right words and guiding the conversation more softly, perhaps.
Peter:Yeah, awesome. Well, pleasure is always dazed. And for all our listeners, don't forget to hit subscribe. We love new subscribers, so and recommend us to some of your friends. Until next time, Peter. Always a pleasure. You've been listening to definitely maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital agile and DevOps at scale.