Definitely, Maybe Agile
Definitely, Maybe Agile
Harmonizing Strategy and Execution: The Power of Language in Agile and DevOps
Ever wondered how to bridge the gap between grand strategy and on-the-ground execution in today's Agile and DevOps-driven world? We're Peter Madison and David Sharrock, and in our latest episode, we crack this code, sharing our experiences and the occasional humorous tale, such as the Austrian airport mix-up meme. We dissect the importance of aligning every cog in the organizational machine, with a special focus on the mental models that guide decision-making. By introducing cutting-edge technologies, we illuminate how enhanced visibility can transform the way your teams operate, ensuring that those crucial organizational handoffs are as smooth as silk.
This week's takeaways:
- Connecting Strategy to Execution.
- Shift in Language and Terminology.
- People-Centric Focus.
We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: 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:Great to see you again, Peter. I'm looking forward to actually being able to meet you in person in the next couple of weeks on traveling out your way. That is fantastic, Can't wait to see you. So and we were just prepping, we're just kind of like noodling on a few ideas. I think this is a warm sort of conversation, if you like, about some of the themes we see coming up over the next six, 12 months, topics that we're finding in our conversations with clients, with organizations that are going through change. That may be a top of mind.
Peter:Yeah, themes, themes that might be of interest to people, things that we're seeing, that are coming up, and the first of those that we were talking about was connecting strategy to execution, and this one partly came to mind as we were talking, because you were telling a funny story about Austrian airports, I believe.
Dave:Well, and that's the little meme that's going around at the moment that's talking about a desk at an Austrian airport designed specifically to deal with customer queries about why they are not in Australia but have found themselves in Austria.
Peter:Yeah, the same to do with the importance of knowing where you're going, and this is the theme that we're seeing, where, as organizations have started to adopt agile and devops practices more as the norm into the way that they operate their technology portfolio, they're now starting to look at well, how do I look at the end-to-end organization? There's still this gap where we have strategy and we have the ability to deliver both initiatives from a business side, initiatives on a technology side, initiatives that involve both but there's a disconnect where we might have better ways of operating on knowledge, work within technology, but that certainly doesn't apply to the organization as a whole and there's a need to still connect the strategy, the direction that we're looking to go in as an organization, to what are we delivering to our customers.
Dave:I think the challenge that you're describing there is almost shifting away from the focus on individual parts of your system and how they contribute, how you can work to improve how they work. Whether we look at, say, devops, processes on the technology side and the process going into how you actually get product out of the door or product and everything that goes with that, product management and all of the headaches and all the bits in between, and the tendency has been to see those in isolation. And when you describe this connection of strategy to execution, I see that as that, instead of focusing on the individual components, it's now how do we get all of that really working together so that the strategy is beginning to be achieved and we're not worrying about this one area over here or the one area over there, but looking at how the whole works together?
Peter:And there's a variety of mental models that we're seeing brought to the table and they've been around for a long time a lot of these and we're seeing how they get applied into situations. But I think there's a theme over the Kanye with the new technologies available to us and new capabilities which enable us to get more information, make information more visible to people, to be able to make decisions and have more decision making capacity, I think that that then becomes the thing which helps this, drive this forward and we. They're from value stream management and areas like this, but also from others where, even like domain driven design and a lot of the other pieces, a lot of these spaces are starting to come together to create that bigger picture view that organizations have been asking for for a very, very long time, but feels a little bit more within sort of theledge and, in that sense, important, how we teach these new technologies to someone.
Dave:It's interesting. So if I think about the organizations that we work with, what we're finding is there used to be that sort of there's a great book out there zero to one, right that zero to one bit and that seems to have been the focus for a long time now of how, from we're like we don't know, how do we get to a position where we do know, we understand and so on. And I think the shift and I think of it as professionalization, because it isn't just about getting from zero to one or getting just that from we don't know anything to at least we understand it is now how do I take that and actually raise that so it's professionally applied in our organization, so that the connections are all there? And the analogy I often start with on this one is is Olympic sports? They always the Olympics always ends at least the summer Olympics is the one I'm thinking of they always end with the relay races.
Dave:And the key about the relay races isn't the running of the leg, that's the individual organization process, whatever it is, optimizing what they do and being brilliant at it. The headache with the relay, the teams that excel are the ones that get the handoffs right and that's that's that professionalization. We can't just say we're good at what we do. We now have to say and you're good at what you do, and how do we stitch that together to give clients, customers, the end users, and experience which is exceptional and we've got to trust one another is they're bringing the right things to the table and really look at those boundaries as much as anything.
Peter:Yeah, those boundaries, the interfaces as we, as the work moves through the organization. So it's critical. So the second theme that we were discussing as we were working through this was the, the change in language away from the agile and DevOps to the more to the, the underlying goals. And this relates back to that first point, in that, within the technology space, these are very, very well known terms. I mean, it's been around for quite some time. Everybody's doing it.
Peter:If it's a common, it's almost the way that you're recommended to go about doing these things. You're building a software product. Use agile and DevOps to build that software product. Tools are all there and click a button. It'll build all of this stuff out for you and away you go. You can spin up entire environments the click of a button and get going. And also, which will help you organize your work and book all of this. So there's there's a lot of capabilities based off these concepts that are available to you if you're going to build something. But the terms themselves, I think, and and we were discussing how they sort of going away in terms of being replaced to think about well, what is the underlying goal of the organization? What are we trying to do as a whole. What are we looking to deliver? How do we take all of that great learning and ensure that the organization's whole is also applying those practices?
Dave:It's so powerful the way you've said that, because it's the. That vocabulary isn't wrong, it's just highly suited to to a specialist group. If you get together with your DevOps tribe, your agile tribe, that's the language, the terminology that allows rapid communication in that subset of the whole organization. But now that it's available, it's understood and kind of taken as a norm in so many parts of the organization that terminology is no longer relevant and in fact it almost hurts you if you try and use that in those organizations because those terms are used in different ways in different places and so you start getting into this sort of confusing conversation. And I mean you mentioned it, that reaction where people have a visceral positive or negative, but a visceral reaction to these terms. We've got to move past that and start looking at you know what are the outcomes we're trying to get? Are we getting the results we need, and things like this.
Peter:Yeah, and yeah, I was referring to a couple of interactions I had late last year where these terms were either misunderstood. I used a term like DevOps and I was reading the expression on the person's face and, even though they were writing down it was clear to me, they didn't understand what I was talking about at all. They were from entirely a different space. They weren't from technology at all. They had no idea what I was referring to. And, asking them and understanding they go OK, it makes sense why they wouldn't have. But the language which we very common to us may not necessarily be common to others. Or reactions where you use a particular term and it's like it's a term which we would think would be perfectly normal, but somebody said, no, I can't understand what that means.
Dave:Ok, that's that whole TLA thing, the three letter acronyms problem, right, that you get into a space where the language is fine tuned for a subset of individuals that have a very specific understanding. Well, now we have to generalize that language, we have to loosen it a little bit and it sounds like it's just language, but it's expectations, it's a little bit of everything that goes with it. Certainly, we're finding having to actually listen a lot more, Because there's got to be some sort of emerging together of understanding and it's not one way educational communication. It's really a OK. What is the terminology in this organization? What's relevant? How can we piggyback on that, leverage it like you know, use that to get some of the principles that we know about adopted in this organization?
Peter:Yeah, because I mean that language serves a very, very specific goal. Within that to try. It allows a much faster communication, much more common alignment to a particular direction. So there's a lot of value in it and we've got to remember that and appreciate it and make it included in what we're talking about as we look to scale outside.
Dave:If I just add to it. We're using the word like it's all terminology and language. We're using that description in that, and it's more than that it's. There's a toolkit. That's the principles and the toolkits and the practices that we're very familiar with We've talked about many times, but they're part of a toolkit. They are not the toolkit, and other people have their own toolkits they're bringing to the table and we need to kind of pull those and be curious to see which tools are going to work, in which scenario, which context, whereas I think in many situations beforehand we've been the experts with the toolkit that everybody was looking for.
Peter:Yeah, yes, and which opens up interesting conversations and allows us to apply a different set of skills knowledge to the table. So, yeah, and so the third thing, because great things come in threes.
Dave:There's all that, there's two people in a conversation. We've really had two people for the most part but, yes, great things come in threes or twos. So people, people, people. It was interesting because, as we're going through, I'm just I was reminded or you and I were both reminded that as the kind of practices and the thoughts and everything has been adopted and has become the norm, what's often being the first thing to be dropped or assumed to be understood and not necessarily followed through, is that it all started around people and it all started that the power in your organization is the people you have in your organization, the processes, the practices, the efficient process approach that you take to things. We get drawn into that, but we've got to remember the people side.
Peter:Yeah, and empowering, enabling people to to act within your organization, is what will really truly drive you forward. It's the and having the right people in the right roles in the right spaces, who are enabled, with the right tools and capabilities and right processes and practices. That's where you really it's all three together. You got to get the everything working for the organization to thrive, and if you just focus on tools and processes, that's not enough to succeed.
Dave:Yeah well, and I think there's there's a lot of talk in the industry, if you like, at the moment focused on the impact of things like AI or, or you know, remote working, return, return to work type of type of practices. People have had more recognition and it certainly seems that the pendulum swinging the other way, and I think we've got to remember that there's still so much like potential, untapped potential, in the teams you have around you, the people you have, and that we maybe want to kind of take a moment to think about that and try and think about how we can recognize that and free that up?
Peter:Yeah, for sure. So with those three points, I think, like connecting strategy to execution, like the change in language to the like, the true power underlying practices like agile and developed, and the focus on how people interact and how that changes as the as our environments evolve as well. And what would you have mean takeaways be from today's conversation?
Dave:You know I'm going to focus. I feel like there's a TED talk that we're going to put in the notes, in the footnotes, by Margaret Hefferman, and she talks about the human skills needed in an unpredictable world and I think we've talked. We ended with the human skills, but that conversational. So there's a number of other skills, like we talked about connecting strategy to execution and so on, and I feel like that's the takeaway. The takeaway is w hat are the themes that feed into working within an unpredictable world? Yeah, what?
Peter:are all the things that we need.
Peter:Yeah that's a good way of looking at it. I like. I like all the different pieces and looking at how they start to interconnect and as we were going through that, it became clearer that the sort of the first pieces tie into the second and tie into the third and it's nice to see how they they all they intersect, and so I think that there's a sweet spot in there where we, if we get all of these things right, then that's where we're aiming for sounds good. So until next time, until next time, we'll look forward to another interesting conversation. Look forward to seeing you in the next couple of weeks and to all our listeners, don't forget hit subscribe. We always like to get new listeners and hear where your hosts
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