What is Agility?
What are the characteristics that contribute to Agility?
What are the team/org structures that support Agility?
What are the challenges that require Agility?
2. An individual, a team, or an organisation
performs better than another one
more knowledgeable & experienced in Lean/Agile
b) How can the
under-performing
one catch-up?
THE PROBLEM
a) Why?
5. A) WHY?
A better ability to balance anticipation (preparation
and upfront planning) and adaptation (sensing &
responding) to the current circumstances?
Image from Jim Highsmith, Agile Software Development Ecosystems
6. B) HOW CAN THE UNDER-PERFORMING
CATCH UP?
- How can the under-performing one improve?
- How can tacit knowledge & tacit experience be
transferred to them?
7. THE FULL STORY
A group of Scientists:
1. Defined Agility and identified 6 characteristics of
Agility that can be developed and measured
2. Defined a continuum from Command & Control to
a flat/edge organisation, and named 5 points of
this continuum that resemble 5 team/org
structures
8. THE FULL STORY
4. Ran empirical experiments with these 5 teams
structures and various challenges, measuring the
performance of each team, and discovered
what challenges benefit more from Agility
5. Identified 9 inhibitors of Agility
6. Drafted a curricula to develop Agility
9. SCIENTIFIC WORK
Scientists: David S. Alberts, Richard E. Hayes, et al.
From 2003 to 2013
- Defined, validated and tested Agility Theory
Study award:
2014 NATO Scientific Achievement Award
10. SCIENTIFIC WORK
Applicability:
- Complex endeavours such as economic development,
cyber-security, civil-military
- Individuals, teams, orgs, collections of orgs
- Business Agility
- IT and non-IT Lean/Agile organisations
- Lean/Agile Software development
11. AGILITY SCIENTIFIC DEFINITION
Agility is
- a new way of thinking about and preparing for
the unanticipated
- the ability to successfully effect, cope with,
and exploit changes in circumstances.
12. MEASURING MANIFEST AGILITY
A measure of manifest Agility is a function of the difference between baseline
and actual performance over time after a change in circumstances
13. 6 CHARACTERISTICS OF AGILITY
A characteristic of Agility can be:
- Passive: an innate quality or design of the entity(*)
- Active: imply the ability to sense and respond
(*) Entity:
an individual, a
team, or an
organisation.
14. 1. VERSATILITY (PASSIVE)
allows an entity to continue to operate effectively as
is, despite changes in circumstances or conditions.
15. 2. FLEXIBILITY (PASSIVE)
When the preferred response
does not work, it’s the ability to
try and employ multiple ways
to succeed, the capacity to
move seamlessly between
them, and the ability to learn
more than one way to do
things .
16. 3. RESILIENCE (PASSIVE + ACTIVE)
the ability to recover from or
adjust to misfortune, damage,
or a destabilizing perturbation
in the environment; the ability
to repair, replace, patch, or
otherwise reconstitute lost
capability or performance, at
least in part and over time.
17. 4. ADAPTABILITY (ACTIVE)
the ability to change work processes and the
organization, to recognize rapid change, changes in
the environment and in shifting priorities, identify the
critical elements of the new situation and trigger
changes accordingly.
18. 5. RESPONSIVENESS (ACTIVE)
the ability to react to a change in the environment
in a timely manner; it involves speed and also the
consideration of when would be the appropriate time
to act.
19. 6. INNOVATIVENESS (ACTIVE)
the ability to do new things and the ability to do old
things in new ways, accomplish something—a
discovery or invention when there is no known
adequate response for the situation.
20. CONTINUUM FROM COMMAND & CONTROL
TO SELF-ORGANISATION
3 Variables:
- Distribution of
information
- Patterns of
interaction
- Distribution of
decision rights to
the collective
21. CONTINUUM FROM COMMAND & CONTROL
TO SELF-ORGANISATION
The 5 structures and
work organisation of
teams and orgs tested
in experiments:
- the 2 ends of the
continuum
- plus 3 intermediate
points
22. EXPERIMENT RESULTS:
MATCHING CHALLENGES WITH STRUCTURE
Edge C2/Collaborative C2 structures are better
when:
1. The environment is highly connected with frequent
interactions that cause a diminished capacity to
predict
2. A certain level of shared understanding is needed
to succeed in important endeavours because the
high level of interdependency
23. EXPERIMENT RESULTS:
MATCHING CHALLENGES WITH STRUCTURE
Collaborative/Edge structures are better when:
3. There are rare, very low probability events that can
occurs and bring great opportunities or risks,
together with huge consequences
4. There is a condition of time pressure because the
amount of information and information processing
required exceed the available time
24. EXPERIMENT RESULTS:
MATCHING CHALLENGES WITH STRUCTURE
Collaborative/Edge structures are better when:
5. The nature and extent of the uncertainty associated
with a situation affects our ability to both formulate
the problem and find an acceptable solution.
25. 9 INHIBITORS OF AGILITY
1. Restrictions on access to available information
2. Confidence that the best approach in already known & always knowable
3. Passive reliance on approved planning, models, methods
4. Lack of diversity
5. Optimized process & investments with lack of basic research and experimentation &
exploration
6. Lack of proper education and training
7. Resistance to change
8. Intolerance to risks & uncertainties
9. Fear of failure and disincentives
26. Short course on Agility: http://www.dodccrp.org/html4/education_nec2.html
Know more: capable of theorizing, arguing, and explaining quite convincingly agile
Do better:
- Customers satisfaction, value & fitness for purpose of features deployed, bugs & down-times, ease to code new features
- Enact Lean & Agile principles & values and adopt practices from many Lean and Agile frameworks based on what is best for the specific context, project, team, organization and situation.
Flat/edge organisations are like unmoderated internet groups, or self-organising teams
Characteristics are valid at individual, team, and organisation level
2 extremes and 3 intermediate points
Agility is measured as variation over time of team’s performance in executing a given task, when unanticipated changes in circumstances happen.
Agility is measured as variation over time of team’s performance in executing a given task, when unanticipated changes in circumstances happen.
Change in circumstances can either have an adverse impact on the measure of value or present an opportunity to improve value or e ectiveness.
Entity is the screw here. Could be an individual, a team, an organisation
E.g. Philips/Slot Combination has more versatility than Philips or Slotted.
Examples:
T-shaped team members
Diversity in the team (people with different background, experiences, approaches)
Working in pair
Entity is the screwdriver here.
Examples:
grow a toolbox/repertoire vs 1-size-fits-all solutions => i.e. Learn practices from Lean, Kanban, XP, Scrum, etc.
Retrospective to inspect and adapt practices
avoid rigid tools that lock you in
Passive Agility examples
- redundant components (working in pair),
- excess capacity or reserves (slack time as suggested in Extreme Programming),
- and fault-tolerant designs and systems (no single point of failure: as fail-over clusters, )
Active Agility examples
A rapid response maintenance capability is an example of an active capability (automatic recovery plan as 1-click rollback in Continuous Delivery, crash only sw for servers, good diagnostic logging)
Note on ability to adopt different team structure based on challenge (from conflicted to edge)
Examples:
Stand-up to share info to detect changes in circumstances
retrospective to inspect and adapt process, and empirical processes,
YAGNI / JIT Just Enough requirements that enable continuous re-planning meeting,
confidence to learn new skill outside comfort zone
Examples
multiple feedback loops & monitoring as immune system,
ability to remain calm and focused in emergency situations, checklist, automated recovery plans
Examples:
Practicing Continuous Delivery, Lean Start-up, Lean UX
safe-fail experiments,
Frequent releases to experiment and learn from feedback
Flat/edge organisations are like unmoderated internet groups, or self-organising teams
Modern approaches are Collaborative and Edge
Traditional/Old approaches include: Conflicted, De-Conflicted and Coordinated
--------------------------------------------------------
Conflicted: Independent teams, each of which is assigned a different area of interest. There is no overall leader. Team members may share info with others on the same team and the team leader.
De-Conflicted: Like conflicted plus: Team leaders are assigned one additional area of interest and may share info with the team leader of that area. Deconfliction is accomplished by sharing of info between pairs of team leaders.
Coordinated: Like de-conflicted plus: A coordinator my share info among team leaders. Coordination is accomplished by the sharing info between the coordinator and team leaders, sharing between pairs of team leaders, and providing appropriate access to info to team leaders as a function of their assigned areas.
Collaborative: Like coordinated but: Team leaders and coordinators are assigned *all* areas (no fragmentation, they all collaborate together) and have access to *all* info of any team (transparency for leaders). In addition, two cross-team members on each team have assess to to info of an area from any team and may share info with other cross-team members of the same area (fragmented transparency for some team members), leaders and coordinator.
Edge: all team members have access to all info of all 4 areas, there are no leaders or coordinators, it’s up to them to self-organise and deal with the tasks related to the different areas.
Needed means: succeed when other structures fails or perform better
With these 5 elements are more intense, Edge works better than Collaborative.
With high level of noise (errors in the available information) Collaborative succeed and Edge fails.
Only when these 5 elements are very low or absent, the other structures works better. With the exception of the de-conflicted for chaotic circumstances and emergencies (see cynefin).
The Agility Advantage: A Survival Guide For Complex Enterprises and Endeavors;
David S. Alberts; 2011
Power to the Edge: Command...Control...in the Information Age;
David S. Alberts and Richard E. Hayes; 2003
http://www.dodccrp.org/html4/education_nec2.html