Harvard Business Review - Agile: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

1. Good intentions arent enough.
2. by Darrell K. Rigby
3. Create a truly flexible organization.
4. by Darrell K. Rigby, Jeff Sutherland, and Andy Noble
5. And how to fix it.
6. by Lindsay McGregor and Neel Doshi
7. Combineand recombineessential expertise.
8. by Alia Crocker, Rob Cross, and Heidi K. Gardner
9. A data-oriented approach helped the social network recoverquickly.
10. by Phil Simon
11. Agile is transforming how organizations hire, develop, and manage their people.
12. by Peter Cappelli and Anna Tavis
13. Set the tone for your organization.
14. by Eric Garton and Andy Noble
15. Tap the people who are better at handling variable and unpredictable situations.
16. by Darrell K. Rigby, Simon Henderson, and Marco DAvino
17. Dont let early excitement lead to backsliding.

AGILE: HOW TO GET IN THE GAME (AND NOT GET IN THE WAY)

by Darrell K. Rigby

Ask general managers what they know about agile, and chances are theyll respond with an uneasy smile and a deflecting quip such as just enough to be dangerous. They may pepper conversations with terms like sprints and time boxes, use agile as an adjective to describe some new initiative, and claim that their businesses are becoming more and more nimble. But because they havent studied the methodology behind agile practices or seen agile teams in action, they couldnt really tell you what agile is all about or how its actually working in their organization.

What is agile? Its a mindset and a method for improving innovation through deep customer collaboration and adaptive testing and learning. Heres how it works.

Agile teams are small, cross-functional, fully dedicated work groups focused on creating innovative improvements to customer products and services, the business processes that produce them, and the technologies that enable those processes. Each team has an owner who is ultimately responsible for delivering value to customers, and a coach who helps the team continuously improve its speed, effectiveness, and happiness. Team members break complex problems into small modules and then start building working versions of potential solutions in short cycles (less than a month) known as sprints. The process is transparent to everyone. Team members hold brief daily stand-up meetings to review progress and identify roadblocks. They resolve disagreements through experimentation and feedback rather than endless debates or appeals to authority. They test small working prototypes of part or all of the offering with a few customers for short periods of time. If customers get excited, a prototype may be released immediately, even if some senior executive isnt a fan, or others think it needs more bells and whistles. The team then brainstorms ways to improve future cycles and prepares to attack the next top priority.

When general managers lack this foundational understanding, their everyday ways of working make adoption of agileand eventual successnearly impossible. These managers launch countless initiatives with urgent deadlines instead of assigning the highest priority to two or three. They spread themselves and their best people across too many projects rather than concentrating everyones energy on full-time, focused teams. Many managers become overly involved in the work of project teams. They routinely overturn team decisions and add review layers and controls, trying (usually in vain) to keep mistakes from being repeated but, in the meantime, hampering the speed of innovation. With the best of intentions, they erode the benefits that agile innovation can deliver.

Sound familiar? Too many companies suffer from too much bureaucracy and not enough innovation. Their organizations are unbalanced. Bureaucratic processes originally designed to make successful practices repeatable and scalable have taken over. They have created static business systemssystems that are incapable of adapting to dynamic markets.

The solution to this problem already exists in thousands of companies. Trouble is, its often hidden inside IT, whose techniques and terminology already intimidate other departments. But the IT folks are onto something: agile has revolutionized technology development over the last 30 years. According to a 2018 survey by the website Stack Overflow, 85% of software developers use agile techniques in their work. Agile increases team productivity and employee satisfaction. It minimizes the waste inherent in redundant meetings, repetitive planning, excessive documentation, quality defects, and low-value product features. By improving visibility and continually adapting to customers changing priorities, agile boosts customer engagement and satisfaction, brings the most valuable products and features to market faster and more predictably, and reduces risk. When agile engages team members from multiple disciplines as collaborative peers, it broadens organizational experience and builds mutual trust and respect.