Agility for Excellent Technical Leaders
Agility is a critical pillar in the technical leadership framework.
Agility must be understood as a critical success factor for business innovation. Technical and technology leaders in this era must perform and execute with agility to be influential, competitive, innovative, and productive in their fields and domains.
Speed to market is one of the most fundamental requirements of business organisations nowadays. Agile became the new norm in technology organisations. Products are expected to be released faster than they were in the past. For example, security updates and bug fixes are required more frequently.
In this economic climate it is impossible to succeed with old methods and tools as many organisations have already adapted to agility and matured in delivering rapidly. Agility is a particular concern for digital transformation initiatives as consumer demands are increasing based on fast-paced delivery requirements.
Whist dealing with legacy IT footprint in an agile manner, excellent technical leaders have the vision of a well-functioning modernized system and put their energies on rapid-paced innovative digital transformation goals. Technical leaders in digital transformation initiatives strive to make their IT footprint more intuitive, innovative, responsive, and agile at all times.
Agility affects all aspects of digital transformation initiatives. Technical leaders are expected to act, behave, and approach in agility to every aspect of the digital transformation solutions.
In this article I want to touch on critical aspects of agility starting with the communication and promotion of agility in business organisations and delve into other important aspects.
How to promote & communicate agility
Promoting agile is reasonably easy due to its nature and compelling reasons for many business organisations. It is more viable for startup companies. As we know, agile is a particular interest to the new generations as they grow with agility in all walks of life. However, the older generation still has a sentimental attachment to waterfall methods. There appears to be some comfort zone created for using waterfall methods in some traditional business organisations.
There is a common perception that agile methods cut things short hence reduce the quality; however, this is not entirely true or it is context-specific. It is evident that many agile projects can increase the quality of solutions due to iterative approaches and checking quality more frequently in every milestone of the project.
Excellent technical leaders can articulate the benefits and compelling reasons to use agile methods, especially for digital transformation initiatives. It is not feasible to wait and see the end of a gigantic digital transformation project. Ther are so many unknowns; hence, it is not possible to see the end product without ongoing experimentation based on trials and errors.
An agile approach allows the team members to test their ideas iteratively. If they fail, they fail quickly and cheaply without costing lots of funds to the initiatives. This business value needs to be understood well and needs to be embedded in the culture of the business organisations striving for rapid digital transformation outcomes. Excellent technical leaders are the catalyst for conveying the message and making the necessary cultural adjustments effectively.
Technical leaders ignite and maintain agility
Excellent leaders ignite agility as being motivators and role models. As they are technically capable and business-focused, they show the value and share their knowledge, point of views, and experience with team members and other stakeholders.
These leaders actively participate in agile scrum teams and provide ongoing input, feedback, and hands-on support to the development and design teams. For example, technical leaders can perform the role of the product owner in agile scrum teams. As product owners, they set the acceptance criteria for the solution product and services in the digital transformation project sprints.
Technical leaders develop mental models on how technology users interact with their solutions in each iteration of the sprints. With their action-oriented approach, they clear the backlogs quickly and in priority orders focusing on important and urgent matters to make immediate difference.
In addition, excellent technical leaders use rewards and recognise the high achievers’ effort and contributions for clearing the backlogs in the most effective and innovative ways. This is an evident success factor for timely completion of user stories in each allocated sprint of the solution iterations.
Pragmatic architecture in an agile approach
Based on my years of experience as an Enterprise Architect for digital transformation initiatives, I noticed that architecture creates tremendous fear for business organisations due to some valid reasons.
We know that architecture involves things that are hard to change at later stages of the solution lifecycle. However, this premise doesn’t mean we cannot apply agile to architecture. There is a massive trend and many practical examples to use agile methods for developing architectural solutions in the industry.
Technical transformation leaders need to take a pragmatic approach to the architecture development process. We know that predicting the future can be very hard; therefore, creating an upfront paragon of architecture does not seem to be practical any more.
We cannot afford the use of waterfall methods for developing architectures for many months and even years in this economic climate. Taking this extended time is not feasible for digital transformation initiatives. The main reason is consumers expect product and services much quicker than olden times.
An experimental and iterative approach to architecture can be the most effective investment in the earlier stages of the digital transformation solution lifecycle.
We can see the architecture development process like a product development process. The experimental and iterative approach can speed up the architectural process and can improve the quality based on the manifestation of the minimally viable product development approach.
Rapid Development & Sense of Urgency
After architecture and design, another big topic and concern for technical leaders is the solution development process. For example, by using waterfall methods developing a software product used take months and years in the past.
We know that consumers cannot wait so long any more. The practical solution to address consumer demands is applying an agile approach to the development process. Fortunately, agile methods are proven to be more suited to the development process in the digital transformation initiatives.
There are many evolving agile methods to support different kinds of development processes. It is fortunate that software developers globally embrace agile methods; perhaps with a few sceptical exceptions. These developers can experience the results to manifest much more quickly.
Use of evolving methods such as DevOps as part of the continues development paradigm shift is a prime consideration for enabling digital transformation outcomes for the consumers.
Excellent technical leaders have a strong focus on rapid development and deployment of flexible solutions using agile methods. These leaders are aware and mindful that speedy time-to-market for digital products and services is a competitive differentiator for business organisations in this day and age.
Agile design & development require automation
Transforming to digital services and delivering products fast to market requires substantial automation activities. Agile methods have a particular focus on automation capability. Automation can enable simplifying, standardizing, and speeding up the solution processes.
Excellent technical leaders understand the value of automation for business organisations, and they know that through automation, they can reduce the number of resources required to maintain manual and tedious systems.
Automation can address human errors and resolve potential errors in an effective way. People in agile cultures do not resist against automation, in fact, they embrace it because they know that automation increases quality.
Technical leaders with particular focus on automation move people to more value-adding roles rather than performing repetitive and boring tasks that computers can undertake. People focusing on stimulating and high-value items also tend to create more innovative solutions.
I submitted an article providing an example of automation under the title of Business Value and Architectural Overview of R.P.A (Robotics Process Automation).
Agility requires removing organisational silos
Organisational silos are proven to slow the whole solution life cycle, from architecting, designing, developing, marketing, and selling products and services. Organisational silos also impact the quality of the products due to a lack of integrated view in siloed cultures.
Business departments in silos may not know each other’s progress and cause some duplicate of works or rework. They may not produce a single integrated product or services to the consumers.
Ironically, some departments in these traditional settings in the same organisations even compete with each other. What an undesired situation!
An agile solution approach requires moving from silos to flatter structures to resolve the issues of isolated and hierarchical structures in large business organisations.
Excellent technical leaders following the agile methods pay special attention to collaboration, co-locations, and face to face teamwork rather than having fragmented silos and hierarchies in their business organisation.
Technical leaders continuously deal with organisational culture and business ecosystem implications. They strive to break silos. Instead of coming above, they move in parallel steps hence they create flat structures, resulting in collaborative self-managing teams with many domain experts as peers.
Transformation backlogs must be cleared rapidly
Rapid maintenance of backlogs in agile methods is critical. Excellent technical leaders make day to day management of backlogs in a priority order a habit. They manage their team’s backlog effectively using various proactive approaches. Even if they perform the role of a scrum master or a product owner, these technical leaders keep the team members accountable for their backlog items.
Since technical leaders know the importance of prioritisation, they continuously focus on the priority items and deal with the backlog items based on a priority order. Backlogs monitored closely by the technical leaders can run very efficiently and productively. Backlog management is a critical success factor of digital transformation solution sprints.
Backlog management priorities are set by using various factors and considerations. One of the critical factors is the creation of a minimum viable product (MVP) using an agile method.
A sprint in an agile method is applied as the shortest time bombed duration in order to create the minimum viable product (MVP). Consumer expectations, financial constraints, resource issues, and business priorities all have an impact and are critical factors on setting priorities for clearing backlogs in a timely manner.
Agile methods mandate constant change
Agile methods mandate a constant change to achieve MVP. Change management is a vital aspect of agile methods in digital transformation initiatives. Embracing change by technical leaders is critical success factors in agile continuous delivery. Adapting to constant change is a significant focus area for the technical leaders to maintain agility.
For example, managing every user story, clearing backlog items, and running sprints are all about constant change focus for technical leaders in digital transformation initiatives. Dealing with this constant change requires flexibility and agility in designing, developing, implementing, and supporting agile solutions.
Technical leaders and their followers engaged in agile processes and solutions passionately embrace the constant change. They become the change agents for the success of the solution in the business organisation. The digital transformation initiatives certainly need such a change-oriented agile and flexible approach.
Agile dictates failing fast yet cheap
One of the benefits of using agile methods come from the iterative solution approach. In other words, we can tackle solutions in smaller chunks with agility, bit by bit. Agile methods are based on the entrepreneurial principle of the fail fast, fail early, and fail cheaply.
Of course, failure is not the end game, and for the sake for failure itself. No one desires or enjoys failure. However, it is beneficial to fail earlier than later to keep the cost of failure low and be successful in the long run leveraging the lessons learnt from the small experimental failures.
Even though the term is called ‘fail fast’ it actually refers to constant trial and error to deal with unknowns in a fast, flexible, and effective manner. Learnings from these experimental trial and errors constitute the rapid progress for designing, developing, implementing, and supporting complex solutions.
Agility focused on cost, revenue, & profit
In business, we can consider every resource and effort as a cost. Even though technical leaders are well paid and costing business for their salaries, as they are cost-conscious and know how to reduce cost, they make their projects profitable, generate more revenues, and earn profits especially delivering with agility and flexibility. They focus on increasing solution efficiencies by lowering substantial costs resulting in increasing revenue and profits.
Agile is a cost-focused, revenue and profit-generating approach. Technical leaders can manage costs better and generate more revenue and profit by adopting agile approaches in high impact tasks, solution design, development, implementation, and support activities in their business organisations.
Through incremental progress, prioritised backlogs management, speedy iterative delivery through sprints, the cost of failure for big chunks of work items can be prevented, and costs can be turned into revenues in a productive way.
Excellent technical leaders are capable of turning costs to investment dollars. Due to their strategic vision, innovative approaches, and agile delivery, the costs incurred from the initiatives of these leaders can be seen as an investment yielding measurable revenues and recognised profits. Investment on excellent technical leaders generate new business opportunities and bring substantial revenues with their contributions both at tactical and strategic levels.
How do you maintain agility in your business?
