Why have we focused on business agility as opposed to agile?
It is all about outcomes.
Picture here Input – activity – output – outcome
What are the outcomes we are after and why are we looking to change our ways of working. Unless we know the why that is powerful and is understood and owned at every level within the organisation we are at risk of superficial change and check box results.
How do we know, we are doing superficial change?
We declare we are agile based on activities such as how many people have been trained, how many teams using an agile approach.
How many communities of practice we have, how many transfer of information sessions we hold.
How many conferences we are invited to, internal events, conferences we hold and the speaker profiles.
Aren't these all good activities?
Yes, they are so what is the problem?
The problem is that when we do what we can do as opposed to what we need to do we are at risk of running out of time, money and energy.
We will struggle to answer our colleagues and sponsor questions, such as what have we achieved, what is the result?
We respond by the number of training courses we have run or number of people we have trained.
The problem is that these kind of responses do not pass the so what test. Here's how you can use it yourself.
How is the agile transformation going? We have 50 teams starting work using an agile method with 15 using scrum.
So what?
What is the result, if you struggle to answer what is the result or the impact then you know that your focus is on activity as opposed to outcome.
Insert iceberg photo
Start with the outcome.
Define the outcome as a set of narrative of what you would like to see. Here is an example
