Conquering Famine in Agile Organizations: A Blueprint for Success 🚀
Hello, Agile enthusiasts! Today, I’m diving into a topic that resonates deeply with many of us in the Agile world—famine. No, not the kind you’re thinking of, but rather the scarcity of essential resources within organizations that hampers our journey to success. This famine manifests through a lack of tools, trust, training, and sometimes, the financial backing necessary to propel our teams and products forward. 🌪️
The Roots of Famine in Agile Landscapes 🌵
Famine in Agile settings is often a byproduct of traditional, top-down management structures. This antiquated approach can leave our teams starving for what they need most:
Trust: Essential for empowering team members to take the actions needed without second-guessing.
Financial Support: Often blocked by higher-ups who fail to see the forest for the trees, focusing on budgets over value.
Training and Tools: Critical for team development and efficiency but frequently overlooked or underfunded.
Personal Insights: The Spanish Example 🇪🇸
Let me share a revelation from my experience with organizations in Spain, where every employee is allocated a personal budget for training. This empowerment allows individuals to invest in areas they’re passionate about, whether it’s Agile training, technical skills, or something else entirely. This approach eradicates the famine of growth opportunities, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and self-determination.
Breaking the Chains: Empowerment over Restriction 🔗
The challenge often lies in bureaucracy and the “Bean Counters” who gatekeep the resources necessary for innovation and progress. This control doesn’t stem from malice but rather a misguided attempt to manage costs without understanding the broader impact of their restrictions.
A Story of Transformation 🔄
Consider the tale of a major car manufacturer grappling with an outdated machine that, despite constant repairs, couldn’t meet the production line’s evolving needs. The request for a new machine—a hefty $2 million investment—was denied due to budget constraints, leading to over a billion dollars in lost revenue and rework costs. It’s a stark reminder that penny-wise can indeed be pound-foolish.
The Path Forward: Strategies for Overcoming Famine 🌟
To navigate and ultimately overcome the famine within our organizations, consider these actionable strategies:
Empower at All Levels: Shift decision-making authority closer to those with the keenest understanding of what’s needed. This could mean allocating training budgets directly to team members or enabling frontline workers to approve necessary expenses.
Foster an Environment of Trust: Cultivate a culture where trust is the foundation, and every team member feels valued and believed in.
Redefine Budgetary Approaches: Advocate for budget flexibility that prioritizes value delivery over strict adherence to fiscal allocations.
Promote Transparency in Decision-Making: Ensure that the rationale behind financial decisions is clearly communicated and understood, highlighting the impact on the organization’s broader goals.
Invest in People: Recognize that your team’s growth and development are the most valuable investments you can make. Encourage continuous learning and provide the tools necessary for success.
Implementing Change: A Consultant’s Perspective 🔍
As a consultant, I’ve witnessed firsthand the transformative power of addressing famine within organizations. From personal experiences requesting essential software licenses to observing the detrimental impact of underfunded necessities, the path to alleviating famine lies in empowerment, trust, and strategic investment.
Conclusion: A Call to Action for Agile Leaders 📣
Famine, as a harbinger of the Agile apocalypse, is a formidable foe, but not an insurmountable one. By reevaluating our organizational structures, empowering our teams, and prioritizing the resources essential for agility, we can turn the tide. Let’s commit to nurturing environments where scarcity is replaced with abundance, enabling our teams and products to thrive.
Remember, the journey to Agile success is paved with the resources we choose to invest in. Let’s make those choices wisely, and together, we’ll conquer the famine and emerge stronger, more resilient, and unstoppable. 💪
Until next time, keep pushing boundaries and challenging the status quo. And, if you’re looking to dive deeper into Agile, Scrum, or DevOps discussions, feel free to reach out for a chat over coffee. ☕
Thanks for tuning in. If you found this post enlightening, don’t forget to like, follow, and subscribe for more insights and strategies to fuel your Agile journey.
One of the harbingers of the agile apocalypse is famine, and famine manifests in organisations by lacking something. You know, people, teams, groups, leaders, products. We don’t have the things we need in order to be successful. Quite often, that’s because of one of the other harbingers: the top-down management structure. We effectively don’t have what we need. We’re either starved of trust in our teams and our organisation, so people can’t do the things that they need to do because nobody believes that they’ll do it right. They might be starved for money, right? Quite often in organisations, you need somebody high enough in the organisation to approve the spending of money.
But what if that person’s high enough in the organisation that they actually don’t give a [__] about the problem? They actually don’t care. They’re just looking at their budget and going, “It’s not in my budget for this year, so no, I’m not going to sign off on that.” Yeah, but what’s the actual real cost of making that decision? What’s the impact on the people doing the work, on the customer of making that decision? “It’s not in my budget for this year” is not a good answer to that, and it results in that famine. We don’t have the stuff we need.
Do the people in your organisation have the training they need? I work with a couple of organisations in Spain where every single member of the organisation, every employee, has their own budget for training. They decide how they want to spend it. If they want to spend it on some agile training, or they want to group together and buy some training together, or they want to spend it on technical training or on whatever they want, they’re able to spend it on whatever they want. It’s their budget that they get to spend. They’re not starved for things that they need; they have the ability to get the things that they need.
How do you do that in your organisation? I’m working with an organisation at the moment that I needed a piece of software as a consultant helping this organisation. In order to facilitate, I needed a licence for a particular piece of software, and I had to go on and request that licence. I made that request two and a half weeks ago. I escalated it a week ago. There was a little escalation button on the page where you can request it, so I escalated it after a week of nothing happening, and I still don’t have a licence for that software. I still don’t have access to that thing.
What is the cost and impact of that delay? What is the cost and impact to the organisation of me not being able to provide the services that I could be providing to people inside of the organisation? What is the cost of all the people that I would be providing those services to that can’t get those services because there’s a fundamental piece of the puzzle missing? There’s a blocker in the way of actually doing work.
So famine is all about those things that make sure that people don’t have the things they need. It’s not deliberate, right? These policies—somebody didn’t go, “Let’s make sure people don’t have the stuff they need.” Nobody did that, right? They were looking at somebody at a level who’s, I guess we would traditionally call them bean counters. The bean counters are looking at the amount of money something costs, and they want to restrict access to that thing so it doesn’t cost more. This could be travel, this could be software, this could be training; it could be anything.
But who are the people that understand the most about what is needed in order to maximise the success of the organisation? A great example of this is one of the organisations that I worked with for training. They’re a very big car manufacturer, and they had a circumstance in their organisation where a machine—I don’t know what the machine was doing, but the machine was creating something for the production line for the cars, for the parts, right? And it was no longer operating in a way that it needed to operate. It was too old; no matter how much repair you did, it wasn’t going to be able to actually do the things they had to do.
A ton of workarounds to make it actually suit the needs of the business, and that machine really needed upgrading to the newer version of that machine that supported more capability, that was able to do more stuff, more cheaply, more effectively, faster. The person who runs the machine followed the business procedures and wrote the business case for it, sent it up the chain, and that’s it. It got to somebody who was looking at their budget and said, “Nope, I don’t have $2 million in my budget for this new machine, so scratch it off.”
When they finally figured out that one of the major problems they had was this machine was making defective and inaccurate parts, they found that it actually cost the organisation over a billion dollars in lost revenue, in having to rework things, in fixing stuff in production. If you can imagine if you have to recall a car or a model of car because something’s wrong with it fundamentally, what’s that going to cost you down the line? But it wasn’t in this block’s budget.
But do you think that block had the power to approve a billion-dollar loss for the company? No, no. Nobody has that power to be able to do that, but they can block the thing that might result if it’s blocked. It might result in that. So what they did as an organisation, this particular organisation, is they pushed responsibility for spending money down to the people who were best placed to make the decision.
Anybody in the organisation, no matter how below you are, can approve any needed expense of any amount for doing your job. You might need to validate it afterwards, right? You need to—it’s almost like you’re pre-approved to expense it, but then you still have to write the business case. You still have to say, “This is why we bought this. This is what it was for. This is what it was needed. This was the impact.” You still have to do all of those due diligence things, but you’re not blocked from solving the problem.
What’s causing famine in your organisation? Thanks for watching the video. If you enjoyed it, please like, follow, and subscribe. I always reply to comments, and if you want to have a chat about this or anything else agile, scrum, or DevOps, then please book a coffee with me through Naked Agility.
