Agile Know-How Magazine • Fall 2017
Until organizations value
time-to-market more than
employee utilization, they will
be unable to improve
their ability to deliver
value quickly
achieve success. Once it believes this, it is ready to embrace an
empirical approach.
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Belief #3: “Delivering business value is more
important than individual employee utilization.”
Knowledge work in the 20th century came to be characterized
by functional separation into roles and job categories, based on
the assumption that work is specialized and that the best way to
reduce costs is to keep expensive resources as busy as possible
all the time. This usually means that people work on lots of
different projects at once to minimize idle time. Since almost
everything modern organizations do requires people to work
together, the result of this is that everyone waits on someone else
to get things done. More multitasking means more waiting on
others, which leads to more multitasking and more waiting. The
result is that delivering even the simplest change can take a very
long time due to waiting and hand-offs.
Delivering value faster to customers means reducing wait time,
which means reducing role specification and dedicating re-
sources to focus on product delivery. The Scrum team does this
by having dedicated multi-skilled resources that reduce their
dependence on resources external to the team. This minimizes
wait time and improves time-to-market. Until organizations
value time-to-market more than employee utilization, they will
be unable to improve their ability to deliver value quickly.
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Belief #4: “The organization’s leaders believe
that their teams are capable of making
decisions and of doing the right thing.”
Traditional organizations reward and promote based on the
ability for individuals to get things done. They reward initia-
tive and results. They celebrate “heroes” who single-handedly
rescue troubled projects from disaster. The underlying belief
is that teams are incompetent on their own and that without a
strong hand guiding them they tend to be hapless. Unfortuna-
tely, this tends to be true in organizations that punish mistakes
and do not encourage learning and innovation. Leaders in these
cultures use phrases like “accountability” and want to have “one
throat to choke.”
Unfortunately, when the work is complex, these “heroes”
usually cause more damage than they fix. Delivering software
or designing complex physical products that involve software is
a complex team activity, and not the result of individual heroic
acts. When the work is complex enough to require a team of
professionals to deliver the product, managers must trust that
the team is capable of making important decisions. Managers
can set goals, ask questions, and clear impediments, but they
must accept that they don’t understand the work and can’t
effectively direct it. This realization can be an emotional punch
in the gut and is one of the hardest transitions a manager has to
make when adopting an Agile approach.
When leaders believe in teams, they are tolerant of mistakes.
They ask questions that help the team learn from empirical
data. They use retrospectives at multiple levels to help the orga-
nization learn and improve. They DO NOT look to lay blame
or punish mistakes. They DO help the team clear roadblocks
and make sure they have the resources they need.
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Belief #5: “The organization’s leaders
believe that innovation is more important than
efficiency.”
An organization that values efficiency over innovation believes
that it knows its customers and that it is building the products
those customers want. It also believes that it is doing it better, at
least in some important dimensions, than its competitors. An or-
ganization that values efficiency over innovation believes that it
will differentiate itself through lower costs, or that its prices are
good enough, and it simply wants to increase its profit margin.
An organization that thinks efficiency is more important than
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