Improved Project Visibility: A Top 3 Benefit of Agile

Visibility, the ability to see what is in front of you, is critically important for companies in order to remain profitable and relevant in their industry. Imagine how difficult it would be for you to drive a car without being able to see the road.  Adding in weather impediment elements can hamper your ability to reach your destination on-time even further. Even the sunniest days can blind your vision causing you to be distracted from where you are going.

Just like with driving a car, it’s a leader’s ability to chart the course with a clear vision for what the customer needs, along with what the teams can deliver, that is key to business success. So it comes as no surprise that 87% of the 10th annual State of Agile survey respondents said that the “ability to manage changing priorities” remains as the top improvement result of implementing agile practices. The ability to change helps foster the #2 item on that list, “increased team productivity” at 85%, and both of those are a result of “improved project visibility” at 84%.* In fact, managing change, increased productivity, and improved project visibility have been at the top of this list for the past five years.

While change and productivity are so very important, visibility is the key that paves the road to agile success. Without visibility, how hard would it be to change course quickly? Without visibility how do you track and measure productivity improvements? And just like in driving, visibility is a two-way street. Teams need to know where they are going as much as the leaders of your organization need to know what the current map looks like, how fast the cars are driving, and how close we are to various destinations.

Whether you are a senior leader, or a member of an agile team, here a few key areas to help your company reap the benefits through better visibility practices:

Team Visibility

• Know the important team indicators that drive the company’s success (e.g., velocity, throughput, productivity)
• Align your work items correctly to help influence the success factors and be open to discussing this in your daily and weekly planning sessions
• Be transparent with leadership and encourage them to be more involved in reviews
• Share impediments and bad news as quickly and efficiently as possible
• Practice extreme visibility with all your indicators, make them visible and known far and wide

Leadership Visibility

• Become a trust agent for your teams and remember to always be building trust
• Share company news and the key indicators that drive the company, have the teams help create these key numbers in partnership (e.g. share ownership on scorecards and dashboards)
• Know how the teams operate and understand the value of their processes and ceremonies (act and think more like a team member)
• Celebrate every win and encourage good behavior (vs discouraging bad behavior)
• Ruthlessly remove impediments for the team to help them be successful

Improving the visibility in your organization can produce amazing results. Agile companies strive to provide customer value early and often. The State of Agile Report once again highlights how agile companies are seeing productivity improvements that boost company profits and increase the number happy customers.

So You Think You Can Agile?

Let’s say your corporate organisation has just declared publicly that it’s “agile”: what does that really mean?

Since the Australian Prime Minister announced that “The Australia of the future has to be a nation that is agile,” we assume he’s referring to our role as an agile society and how corporations can enact that change. His proclamation seems to have spurred a great deal of movement by large corporates to respond in their shareholder statements, meeting that call to action.

Moving toward business agility means significantly changing the way we work, the way we approach our roles and the way in which, as knowledge workers, we all interact.

In our world, we define business agility as:

The ability of an enterprise to sense and respond to change quickly and confidently—and as a matter of everyday business.

Let’s imagine we take the “a” word (agile) out of the corporate statements. Could the ASX-100-listed organisations state that they not only merely respond to change but are sensing (innovating, hypothesising and learning) and creating (experimenting, testing, learning some more)? Once they’ve evaluated that part of the statement, can they then really lay claim that they do all of these things quickly and confidently?

Agility Is a Journey

When considering the organisational impact of this definition, the task ahead feels daunting for many. Moving your organisation toward business agility is a journey: you not only need to provide clear executive leadership, but make and meet your commitments throughout your continuous improvement effort. However, the return on investment of such a journey is clear.

MIT Sloan reports that agile firms growing revenue 37% faster and generating 30% higher profit. (source)

In a recent article, nine large Australian enterprises stated that they are adopting more lean and agile organisational and operational business models. All are profitable or have seen significant profit growth in the previous 12 months. Does that mean we can attribute part of their success to becoming or being more agile? We also need to understand how they are sustaining and improving agility, and building an ongoing culture of learning.

Many of the organisations we work with have great team-level IT execution and are now more concerned with how they align their capacity to build the right things (versus building things right) to their business needs over a longer time horizon. They’ve observed some small wins around productivity but are now looking for those larger organisational gains that relate back to the MIT Sloan metric I shared above.

Have they truly taken the learnings from team-level agile up into programs and beyond into their portfolio and investment strategies? Or should we say, are their customers realising value, continuing to engage with these enterprises and paying it forward? A big challenge lies in understanding the goal for change and having the right organisational support to implement it. Then, you need to strive for some level of consistency and repeatability whilst still respecting the definition of agility. Team-level agile is a starting point for many, but realising big change requires consistent commitment across the enterprise.

Sustain Change with an Agile Approach

You don’t change an entire organisation overnight. Once you’ve identified clear leadership and compelling goals for your organisation, you need to take an agile approach—small but committed steps with open communication and feedback loops at each step of the journey. Ensure that you have a well supported executive leadership team that owns the sustainable change and helps steer change across the business. It all requires a combination of education at all levels, a clear roadmap for change and coordinated coaching, facilitation and change management.

I often reflect on how the agile community (the agile of the Agile Manifesto, complete with values, principles, etc.) supports or even contradicts this theme. There is a need for some semblance of consistency for these large enterprises—oh no, did I just tell you we need a framework? How very unagile of you!—a topic for another time perhaps.

The interesting thing here is that everyone in the market—customers, communities, consultants, vendors and partners—wants the same outcome. Improving the way organisations work to ultimately enhance our way of life as a society: eliminating waste and responding to change quickly and confidently (well, at least that’s what my team and I want).

So, one can only live hoping that’s why we’re all here—to continue toward autonomy, mastery and purpose and in turn help enterprises do the same. We all want to embrace, educate and coach great outcomes for the people who work in these enterprises. Who doesn’t want to get up and be excited about the day of work ahead and help people improve their capabilities to ultimately create a better society?

It’s obvious we have a great opportunity ahead of us to perhaps even leapfrog other countries with agility. To learn from their failures (failing fast and learning is good, by the way) and reconnect Australia as a place of free thinking and collaborative learning toward a better, more agile society. As John F. Kennedy once said about improving economic reform, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” If we all pull together, we can help our enterprises and our government become more agile, increase our economic impact, grow and develop better talent and truly declare that yes, Australia is the agile land down under!