agile – Manage Complexity

05/03/202505/03/2025

Organizational accountability with highly autonomous teams

Dear leader,

You’re always accountable for what your part of the organization does.

This is manifested by law for top management, and in most organizations, this expectation ripples down the leader hierarchy. You are held accountable by the leader above you, and you work to keep your employees accountable to the organization. You wish to know the person you can go to when things are not going according to plan.

Western culture deeply ingrains a focus on individual accountability. Even though we know that few business successes have been achieved by individuals, we tend to celebrate the individual at the top of the organization. When things go wrong, we tend to look for an individual who made a mistake further down the ladder.

We know that it is too simplistic. Any business challenge is a complex combination of market, customers, users, technologies, etc., that all continuously develops. Business success is the sum of many decisions made by accountable people throughout the organization daily.

Organizations worldwide have successfully implemented autonomous cross-functional teams to achieve the needed business agility. Using the diverse skill sets in the team, they cope with the complexity of the multiple dimensions and iterate toward optimal solutions for the customers.

This, however, definitively breaks the illusion of a simple chain of single accountability. At the organization’s lowest level, every decision results from collaboration between a diverse group of people, who collectively balance the many concerns that each represents.

Many leaders experience a glass floor between them and these autonomous teams. They find it hard to enforce accountability like they did before. I previously wrote a little piece¹ about this frustration and gave some examples of how team members are not only focussing on their individual success but also can contribute to the greater good of the organization.

In this article, I aim to illustrate how you as a leader can organize and work with autonomous cross-functional teams and secure accountability not only to local success but also to the organization as a whole. Cross-organizational accountability is necessary if you want customers/users to have a cohesive experience and if you want higher productivity through, e.g., standardization and reuse.

05/03/202505/03/2025

Your glass floor is their glass ceiling

Dear leaders,

Many of you have invested much time and money in new ways of working in your organizations to empower autonomous teams either because you really understand the benefits they can gain in both the efficiency² and value³ of the products they develop. Or because you’ve been under the influence by current trends or expensive consultants like McKinsey or alike, who are now also recommending modern product teams as the way to organize for future challenges. It’s been the same promises that’ve been made during the last three decades – since the birth of Agile.

You bought into the need for more business agility to be able to compete and saw a chance to find a path out of the heavy process that slowed down the organization. But many of you who have moved in this direction have also experienced that the promises made have been hard to fulfill and have not come without significant challenges.

You were also promised transparency, but for many it seems more like a glass floor through which they can observe the organization than insights they can use to understand and act upon. For example, they miss what we perceived as clear requirements and progress of projects in the old days. How did we end here?

We’ve all been surprised that following team empowerment, for example, comes resistance from the teams to the organization’s traditional line of command, i.e., the behaviors of leaders.

Suddenly, teams begin to

question your strategy,
find portfolio planning suboptimal,
request or resist organizational changes,
diverge from enterprise architecture
refuse to accept deadlines,
refuse to be measured,
etc. etc.

When did that become a concern of theirs? That is how leaders control the organization!

12/03/202412/03/2024

Three Decades of Agile

The Agile Manifesto [1], created in 2001, brought about a significant shift in the development of (software) products. The values and principles in the manifesto have since evolved and expanded, and we continue to discover better ways to implement them. Overall, the changes have been positive and continue to benefit the industry.

This article discusses the journey we have collectively taken over the past few decades and predicts what is to come. It also highlights the varying levels of maturity that different teams possess, as well as the obstacles that may impede their ability to create value now and in the future.

This discussion is relevant to every team and organization, whether they face challenges typical of previous decades, current challenges, or future challenges. Those who fail to rise to the challenge risk being outperformed by those who do.

In this article, I will refer to the decades as if they represent clear milestones of progress. However, this is a rough oversimplification of what has happened in the Agile community, as well as for individual organizations and teams.

My intention is not to suggest that organizations and teams struggling with issues associated with earlier decades are old-fashioned or doing things wrong. Each organization and team faces unique challenges and has its legacy to contend with. However, I have learned that referring to 2000s-level teams, from a change perspective, is much more potent than addressing structural team problems. The latter is too easy to ignore or make excuses for.

12/05/202013/05/2020

Strategizing over Strategy

“In preparing for battle, I have always found that strategies are useless, but strategizing is indispensable” might be a frank reformulation of the famous quote by Dwight D. Eisenhower⁴. Still, the truth of the increasingly complex business environment is that plans and strategies are invalidated faster and faster. Few CEOs nowadays honestly think that their 5-year or even 3-year strategy is going to last.

Nevertheless, many CEOs nowadays have forgotten that “… strategy has two equally important aspects, interrelated in life … The first of these is formulation; the second implementation … in real life, the processes of formulation and implementation are intertwined. Feedback from operations gives notice of changing environmental factors to which the strategy should be adjusted. The formulation of strategy is not finished when implementation begins. A business organization is always changing in response to its own makeup and past development. Similarly, it should be changing in response to changes in the larger systems in which it moves and in response to its success or failure in affecting its environment.” Andrews 1971 ⁵

20 years later after Andrew’s book, i.e., 30 years ago, the management thinker Henry Mintzberg⁶ further discussed the difference between the intended strategy and the realized strategy created by responding to internal and external changes (see figure to the right). He argues that only a small proportion of the realized strategy is deliberate while the emergent part increases over time.

Every part of running an organization has become more complex over the last thirty years, which means that organizations must continuously strategize to transform changes to emergent strategy.

In its simplest form that means that the strategy-process changes from a perceived linear stage-gate process to a continuous iterative strategizing process as illustrated below:

The first consequence of thinking like this is that a strategy is never new – it is rather an improvement of what was already there. If you think about it: Was there ever a new strategy except when the founders of the company first met ‘in the garage’? Whatever followed that day was adjustments to an existing strategy, organization, products, adjusted customer focus, etc. No matter how radical a new strategy seems, it always contains a continuation of an existing business.

Another consequence of replacing long strategy-periods with continuous strategizing becomes clear as strategy iterations are getting shorter, i.e., the strategy is adjusted more often due to changes/feedback: The people who’re strategizing must be closer to daily business to shorten the feedback loop. The easiest way to get the feedback into the strategy loop is to involve people from the organization who are in the feedback loops with customers, namely those who are in continuous contact with them directly or through IT-systems.

The top-down multi-year-strategy-process was easy to understand, but it has become irrelevant.

The ambition of this article is to make it very concrete how strategies can become more like a living organism than a static document, and make it clearer how strategizing involving large parts of the organization continuously and rapidly can adapt the strategy relevantly. This should be an indispensable capability of every organization.

01/03/2020

Agile Teams must be Cross-functional AND Quad-coloured

Cross-functional teams are the ideal of Agile cross-functional teams because of their ability to deliver high value continuously. Dependencies outside the team are proven to be the number one impediment to value creation⁷. Today we don’t just define cross-functionality as developers with different skills: the DevOps movement has brought operations into the teams, and BizDevOps is a common term for bringing business into the teams as well. I am a big believer in fully cross-functional teams, and I believe they can take direct responsibility for business development⁸.

However, it’s not enough that teams are cross-functional if we desire to create as much value as possible with the resources we have available. It’s not enough that they are efficient within their bubble (e.g. project); portfolio management should make sure that they have the optimal responsibility. We must avoid the vicious cycle of portfolio management. The teams should not only be able to do all the necessary tasks. They should have full lifecycle responsibility for the product; they are developing to maximise their value creation from a holistic perspective.

At the team level, this means that all teams should be Quad-coloured. This article will explain the concept of Quad-coloured teams, which is derived from The Portfolio Circle⁹. If you’re not familiar with The Portfolio Circle, you should read that article first.

This article will also make it clear how the Portfolio Circle and Quad-coloured teams have a significant impact on how we must think about Portfolio Management in the future.

14/02/202001/03/2020

The Vicious Cycle of Project Portfolio Management

Project portfolio management is in most organisations all about the strategic projects. Naturally, the focus is on getting as many of these, mostly far too many, projects through the development organisation as possible and spending as little resources on minor functional improvements, upgrading systems/platforms, and fixing bugs as possible because that is considered less valuable. It is rarely understood that the starvation of these other tasks leads to less overall value and congestion of portfolio planning. In other words, strategic portfolio management is an enemy of itself: too many large strategic projects lead to starvation of other tasks, which again leads to even more strategic projects, more starvation, and a vicious cycle starts.

This article will introduce The Portfolio Circle, which is a more holistic understanding of portfolio management, and it will explain why this is a necessary approach for those organisations who want to maximise value for their customers as opposed to just executing single projects.

The goal in developing this model has been to reduce the complexity of portfolio management, and through deliberate simplicity, create a level of understanding that can contribute to a more holistic use of the resources available to create value for users and customers.

23/05/201828/06/2018

Forget all about Agile Transformations

I have learned over many years of implementing Agile that words, and the images they create, are crucial for your success as change agents. To succeed, it is important that you can explain, what is going to happen, and how it is going to happen in a meaningful way.

I have been heading several of what we called agile transformations without deeper reflection on why we picked that word. I guess we just followed the majority of the agile community without considering the impact that it would have on our efforts to help the organizations to become more agile.

Which images appear in your imagination when you hear the word transformation?

The most used illustration of transformations regardless of kind, is the one from being a caterpillar to become a butterfly. Why’s that?

It visualizes a radical change in form, appearance¹⁰ etc, the result is one of the most beautiful animals on earth and most of us associate it with warm summer vacations. All the way through attractive. The butterfly is also much more agile and free than the slow caterpillar.

And no doubt: Becoming agile is a radical change for large corporations. It is not just employees put in teams doing Scrum events. It is a much more profound change of every part of the organization including the company culture. To describe the extend of the change required to be agile, the word transformation and the image of the butterfly is a good metaphor. The agility and beauty of the butterfly is also an attractive image for the end result of an agile transformation. But does it actually reflect the process of becoming agile?

Continue reading “Forget all about Agile Transformations”