The Manager - 130 - Measuring Agile & Coaching
THE MANAGER - BY ROB LAMBERT
Hi,
I hope you are safe and well. Things are busy here at Lambert Towers. It’s Mother’s Day today (as I write this), so plenty of family time, plus I’ve got a Keynote coming up in April at Star East, so I need to get busy creating that…and the dreaded HR course. If I complete this course, I’ll do a run-down of why I think it’s contributing to the many problems HR seem to “bring” to a business…..
For today though, I’m dealing with the perennial question of how to measure the value of agile and the associated agile coaching.
I think it's pretty simple but in every engagement there is plenty of busy (wasted?) work defining the measures, testing the plethora of online survey tools and arguing about what psychological safety is, whether velocity should be included and what the heck agile actually means.
The usual measures of maturity fall into these simple (but wrong) buckets:
1. Qual surveys about things such as team spirit, collaboration, safety, ways of working. Unscientific, open to gaming and frankly, it can be all rosey and happy in a team but value is still not being delivered. Employee Engagement anyone?
2. Typical agile measures used for improvement such as velocity, cycle time, throughput, work in process and the like - pretty good, but not a measure of agility (because it doesn't include business results) and hard to quantify that a coach had anything to do with this, but useful for process improvement.
What's missing from every measure of coaching and agile that I've seen, is the measure of business results.
This is why it's pretty simple to measure how effective agile, and the coaches are, in an organisation.
You see, the goal of agile is not to be "agile" <-- which is what people are spending their time arguing about and trying to define and trying to compare.
Instead, think of it like this - Agility is to : deliver business results smoothly and quickly.
There are 3 groups of measures to start with - all of which belong, in some way, to management. And all of which are reasonably straight forward to measure. And all of which can be used whether you're scrum, kanban, scrum ban, safe, Less or MoreOrLessSafe....or waterfall.
Measure 1 - Business Results
This is the one that is always overlooked or missing from the maturity measures I see, but it's the main measure of success.
How are the delivery teams measured?
What does success look like?
Why are they paid?
What do they need to deliver to keep their jobs, to get funding, to get another year to do what they do?
What value to they add to the business?
In many organisation who are doing a transformation, it's not clear what people are there to deliver.
Confusion, poor communication, duplication, lack of transparency etc all lead teams to have no clear idea of how they are measured. This is why this belongs to management. This is the business results parts of deliver business results smoothly and quickly.
Managers should understand what they are there to deliver and how they will be measured.
Agile (as a way of working) and agile coaching should amplify those results. Simple as.
Yet, many coaches, leaders and managers are dabbling around measuring retrospectives, stand-ups and the like, whilst not nailing down what success looks like in terms of business results.
Business results are revenue, growth, value to the customer, customer retention, more sales, better operations, reduced costs, etc. These are tried and tested industry standard business results. Surely, this is why companies are going "agile" in the first place? To improve business results.
Start here, define them, qualify them, double check them, make them visible, understand how they are derived, spot trends, understand what they mean and you have clear, measurable outcomes to measure coaching and agile against.
Are business results improving? Are they staying the same? Are they getting worse?
Trust me, I've seen plenty of agile transformations that have resulted in worse business results.
But we're faster and quicker and we collaborate and we stand up and we have a backlog.....but business results are tanking...not success.
Measure 2 - Process Improvement
These are where most coaches and agile "specialists" are spending their time and rightly so, but these should be used to improve business results, not simply be measured and improved because they are deemed agile measures.
Velocity, throughput, cycle time, failure demand, work in process, backlogs etc. These are forms of productivity measures, but they are more impactful when used to improve the process. They help you study where bottlenecks and delays are. They point to problems in the stability of delivery, or where single points of failure are.
These measures are team specific, yet many maturity models use these measures to compare teams. But each team has unique work, different problems, systemic challenges, different people, different measures and goals, different demands, different contexts so why compare?
These measures are for the team to use to make the process better. They are for the team to use to understand how THEY contribute to the process and ultimately, how that process contributes to value for the customer and business. They are in service of business results, not the end results in themselves.
They are powerful, but they are not a measure to use on their own. These measures are the smoothly and quickly from deliver business results smoothly and quickly.
They are used to work out how to get better and improve your business results. And they are very important.
But I've seen teams with unbelievably good measures on maturity models, hailed as model examples of how agile works, only to see that their business results are poor, or getting worse.
The other thing to consider with these measures is that they should be trending time series. After all, a quick rise in these numbers when a coach joins may signify that coaching is adding value, but that rise in productivity and process efficiency may well have happened without a coach being there. It could just be a good week, or month. Time series, trends over time - these tell you whether those sporadic or constant system failures are going away.
As with all measures though, they point to where you need to study. The studying part is the key and then doing something with the data to get better.
Measure 3 - Behaviours
Mindset. Mindset. Mindset. It's all I hear in agile engagements. We need to shift the mindset. We need a different mindset.
But, like most people in this field of work, I am not trained in psychology. It's why it's so frustrating to hear agile coaches and "specialists" talking about why people think the way they do, or how to use X model to change people's mindsets.
I have no idea what people think.
But what I can do is study their behaviours. They may not have an "agile mindset" but they may exhibit very positive behaviours like active listening, asking critical questions, talking about the customer etc.
Let's be honest, we've probably all worked with a coach who bangs on about mindset changes yet their own behaviours are the opposite of what they're preaching. I did a video just this week about the number of consultants and coaches who read stuff then spout it as knowledge.
The behaviours of the company are the culture. So, when we talk about mindset we're often merely a level of abstraction away from behaviours.
Behaviours are what matter but we can never change someone else's behaviour, they must do that themselves. We can influence it, but we cannot change it.
We can set shared goals, design a system of work, give feedback, use role power and all of the rest, but we cannot be guaranteed to change behaviours.
It's why we should hold ourselves to account for role modelling the kinds of behaviours that we want others to exhibit. We should give coaching, mentoring and feedback on behaviours.
And even if they have the worst mindset in the world (which we won't know), if they demonstrate the right behaviours in the workplace, does it matter?
If you've ever managed you know that mindset doesn't count. "Rob's got the least agile mindset ever". "Rob's got a terrible attitude".
So, when I go to speak to Rob and say "I hear you've got a bad attitude and a lack of agile mindset", what does Rob say? "No I don't"......end of conversation.
Yet we can have a conversation about behaviours. "Rob, in that meeting when Sandra was speaking and you cut her off and told her that her idea was useless...that wasn't good".
We can measure behaviours. We can see behaviour changes. We can role model good behaviours and see how others mimic. We can have performance conversations about behaviours. But we are into the domain of management and performance management - another reason why "agility" belongs to managers.
Coaches, trying to nudge mindset, is futile and pointless as we'll never know what people think. Coaches trying to give feedback on poor behaviours....better, but still somewhat futile.
Behaviour nudges are best coming from three places:
1. The system of work (goals, incentives, structure, communication) - a deep topic for sure but the structure of the system often governs behaviours. Tell me how I'm measured and I'll tell you how I'm going to behave.
2. Role modelling by the many (I'm doing a video in a couple of weeks about this). The more people role model the "expected" behaviours, the harder it is to go against the grain.
3. Feedback and nudging from managers with role power. We can ask for more, give feedback and ultimately manage people from the business who refuse to behave in acceptable ways.
Numbers 1 and 3 firmly belong to management - managers created the system so they can change it, they have the role power to ask for better from people, they are responsible for delivering business results, they are on the hook for performance management, they hire, they fire, they set goals and structures and rewards.
Number 2 can be partly done by everyone.
But why are behaviours so important?
Well, it's entirely possible to achieve business results and improve productivity by treating people badly. So, if we want a positive place to work we need to nudge the culture. And culture is nothing more than group habit; how people behave.
After all, we don't want "results at any cost", with that cost being human lives.
Agile maturity models and measures are a futile activity because people are trying to measure what "agile" means. But agility is about achieving business results, not some magical moment of being "agile".
Start with business results and get clear about them. Use the typical agile measures to help the team improve the system and process. And measure behaviours to ensure toxicity isn't creeping in and the culture you are trying to build is nudged in the right direction. And none of the above is possible without managers and leaders role modelling, getting stuck in and measuring the right things.
I had a coach tell me that coaching cannot be measured. It can.
If I hire a coach to work with my team, I expect my team’s business results to improve, and the speed and smoothness to be getting better, and the behaviours to be positive. All of this can be measured. All of this can be used to ascertain the value that coaching has added. And none of this is about being "agile", it's about getting better at delivering business results. All of the rest (scrum, kanban, standups, retrospectives, etc) are approaches and tools to solve contextual problems, not measures of agility. It's entirely possible to be "agile" (as in delivering business results smoothly and quickly) without doing a single standup, or without a single Kanban board, or without doing a retrospective.
Agility is about delivering business results smoothly and quickly and coaches should accelerate and amplify this. And that can be measured.
Until next time
Rob.
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Thanks
Rob..