I saw a post the other day on LinkedIn where someone made the case on how to show value as Agile coaches, consultants, trainers, and leaders.
The article was very math-focused, basically boiling everything down to the following—
Value = (The benefits a client/customer/leader receives – Total cost of ownership)
Then, they provided some value ROI calculations for various roles. All in all, it was a nice, tight argument. The numbers were precise, and the conclusions were telling.
The numbers don’t lie
We’ve all heard this argument or position when folks are speaking about organizational leaders and how they determine value. It’s often arithmetic, algorithmic, and quantifiable. The phrase, the numbers don’t lie or the data doesn’t lie, is usually attached to their perspective.
The Scrum Alliance and the Business Agility Institute partnered on a client survey focused on—Skills in the New World of Work released in October 2023. You can get a copy of the report here.
As a follow-up to the last article I shared on this topic, I thought I’d share something that Jesse Fewell wrote reacting to it.
His reaction was posted on the Scrum Alliance blog, so seemingly in full support of the report.
In it, Jesse highlights three fundamental pivots that agilists should be considering based on the report’s findings. I’ll share my thoughts on each pivot next.
Pivot #1 – Broadcast your bottom-line impact.
This recommendation aligns with the number one human skill recommendation from the report—Communication skills.
The Scrum Alliance and the Business Agility Institute partnered on a client survey focused toward—Skills in the New World of Work that was released in October 2023. You can get a copy of the report here.
The key question on the cover – Which agile skills are most in demand in today’s workforce?
But on page #20, the key question is reframed to – Which skills are most in demand in today’s workforce?
While the questions are close, I’m imagining the “agile” drove most of the respondent thinking.
I would encourage everyone to read it, as it contains some interesting findings and insights. That being said, there are some things in the survey (assumptions, commentary, shared data, and conclusions) that I want to challenge a bit. While the overall tone of this article will be constructive feedback, I don’t want to diminish the effort behind the report.
In a recent Moose Herd the discussion surrounded the release of the report and the impact and relevancy of the findings. How it was something interesting, thought-provoking, insightful, and new. I honestly didn’t read it entirely that way. Instead, I felt it also a bit contrived, self-serving, and old news. Now let’s serially walk through the report for my more detailed reactions…
I saw this post on LinkedIn the other day from Brian Orlando. I read it and a few comments, which motivated me to write this post.
Here’s Brian’s initial post—
I've been thinking...
In the latest Arguing Agile Podcast podcast where Hemant (Om) Patel and I discuss Peter Drucker's three different types of teams, right near the end we started to talk about aligning #management with/to the appropriate team model.
Anyone who has been involved in an #agile transformation knows organizational design changes are likely required for success (in response to product challenges, changing markets, etc).
I'm wondering why the obstinate resistance to responsive #organizationaldesign and #organizationaldevelopment?
I happened upon the Boston Consulting Group paper entitled Why Your Agile Coaching Isn’t Working—And How to Fix It.
Here’s a short snippet from the article that I want to use as a backdrop for several points—
The coaching playbook is especially useful when coaches run two-week “sprint” interventions with teams that need to improve a specific capability or to address performance gaps. The coach then chooses from hundreds of “battle-tested” interventions in the playbook that target that capability or performance gap, and designs a sprint plan based on it. At the end of the sprint, the coach and team evaluate the impact of the intervention. Reflecting on the effectiveness of the intervention and creating new ones also helps propagate and improve the catalog of interventions.
There has been a drumbeat for many years that we need more diversity in the ranks of corporate leadership—particularly women. It’s been increasing in tempo, loudness, and duration, but we still struggle. In this 2021 McKinsey report, women make up only 24% of C-suite roles, and women of color, only 4%--while we’re making progress, indeed, there is much work!
We discussed the latest round of agile role layoffs at Capital One the other day in the Moose Herd. The news was that Capital One had laid off 1100 people, all with agile in the titles/job families. The public reason shared was that they’d sufficiently evolved their agile capabilities to a point where it made no sense to have independent roles. That (everyone) was now agile.
Of course, there was quite a passionate discussion about—
What are the fundamental driving forces behind the move?
Was this a perceived success / evolutionary step or a failure?
Since Capital One was such a bellwether, was this the beginning of a trend in the agile community?
What might happen to all of those people?
I was pretty struck by the turbulence that this one event created in our community, as the Herd reflected.
One of the things we got heated about was the intentions of the organizational leaders, particularly exploring whether they valued agile or not. And whether they valued people or not.
I forget when I first thought about this idea, but it’s been several years. It’s about taking a service-oriented view to agile coaching.
One genesis point for me was talking to an agile transformation director leading a team of coaches. He lamented that his coaches were constantly pulled in multiple directions well beyond their capacity and skills.
I brainstormed with him about whether a service-oriented mindset or approach would be helpful to him. And we defined that as—
Define a set of coaching services that his team would provide;
Define Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) or delivery agreements for each service;
Market the services to the organizational stakeholders;
Manage capacity (across services, across coaches, and unique skills);
Perhaps on an annualized basis, reevaluate service outcomes, needs, and rebalance the investment in the team.
One problem he was experiencing was the incredibly broad skillset assumed by his coaching team. That is—they can coach in any situational context. Which certainly wasn’t true. A service orientation would not only define what they would provide but what they would or could not provide.
