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An agile organization is not created by completely optimizing elements isolated from one another—in
their chosen agile method becomes the golden calf. Then the only attempt is to do the method justice rather than asking what creates more value for the customer.
If you continuously do what you’ve always done, the probability is very high that the result will continue to be the same.
The agile methods themselves are not the driving factors for success, rather the mindset behind them determines their effectiveness.
The most important objective in such a workshop is to gain a mutual understanding about how a group of people are currently working together.
it represents what is actually being done right now.
the starting point for im...
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It was difficult to judge whether the agile transformation had a positive effect because there were no "baseline" measurements from before
And now the overall goal—being able to react more quickly to market needs—had not been achieved and was in fact further away than before.
Nowadays, companies and the people in them rarely have the open and unbiased enthusiasm of Gimli. In the film "Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King", the dwarf warrior says: "Certainty of death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?!"
At the very beginning, it was going about improving their Time-to-Market—now, however, everyone was talking about stupid rules that were written down years ago in some kind of agile framework.
implementing these agile working methods becomes the goal itself.
The focus—for the teams as well as for management—is placed on whether or not all of the methods' rules are being followed correctly.
Agility is reduced to something that it shouldn...
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Implementing agile methods is a means – not the purpose – for achieving business agility.
the entire transformation process was set up as a waterfall project with milestones and checklists.
If the desired state is agility, the way there should already be agile.
In the case of Spotify, it was not their intention to deliver a template to many companies across the globe.
Except Spotify doesn't consider its organizational structure to be the secret of its success, but rather as something extremely transient or even somewhat negligible.
W. Edwards Deming one time during a talk with me [The Deming Institute, 2018]: "Every organization is set up perfectly for the results they deliver."
Success depends on answering one question: How do we make our money and which problem are we trying to solve?
If instead you place the focus on the organizational processes and permanently optimize it to fulfill the customers' needs, it's possible that at some point the organizational structure will change.
"Agile" is what the organization becomes through its own development, not something that goes live according to a particular deadline.
Organizational change should start with the organizational processes because fulfilling customer wishes, as well as the Time-to-Market, is a question of the processes used, collaboration and dependencies.
Personally, I find dependency graphs fascinating, but the management and teams were mostly shocked at first.
yet there were a number of dependencies visible that naturally increased the cycle times.
Because what goes out of one system must first be prioritized in the next system.
The idea of eliminating all dependencies in an organization is not realistic.
There should be as many dependencies eliminated as possible. Most important, though, is good management of every dependency which remains.
Russell L. Ackoff said, that therefore, the performance of the whole is never the sum of the parts taken separately, but it´s the product of their interactions.
despite all of the cross-functional and teams-for-products separation efforts in this company, many acute dependencies still existed.
The situation did not improve when the teams started using agile methods.
A team might phenomenally increase their performance and continuously improve themselves, but the effect of this local improv...
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Stringing together locally optimized units does not create a globall...
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the whole point is to create a value chain that is oriented towards the customers' wishes.
Thus, it isn't important how fast individual teams within an organization work. If we want to increase the system output, we must ensure that the right team is working on the right thing at the right time. Put another way: It's about the dependencies, or better said, how you deal with them.
An organization's agility is not created by stringing together a bunch of agile teams. Agility is created when the interactions between teams are agile.
Of all the things in this entire process, the burden was placed on the development teams to become faster.
Flow efficiency—the ratio between working time and waiting time—was in trouble. Yet management expected a faster Time-to-Market by focusing on making a small portion—namely in the development teams—agile.
Business agility is not created when teams hold their Daily Standups and search for improvements during their Team Retrospectives.
End-to-end management of the value stream was missing.
Business agility is created through lean processes that rapidly implement ideas, thus allowing teams to be able to deliver something quickly.
The effect of implicit or explicit WIP limits is, among other things, that the cycle times decrease and the predictability of work completion increases.
The implication is that you cannot determine when work will be finished in a system running at capacity (congested). Predictability and adherence to delivery schedules are not present in such systems!
Visualizing the work shows the true dysfunctionality of a system. The real way to improve things is by limiting the amount of work that is allowed into the system.
If an organization wants to become faster, the primary focus should not be on optimizing the active work.
That is exactly the problem with many efficiency programs:
They focus solely on the active work and want to...
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It makes more sense to focus on the system and work on improving the performance there.
Why I think WIP Limits are Really Good
