The Case Against Scaling Agile

Luottamuksellinen Copyright Reaktor 2013

Copyright Reaktor 2013 Luottamuksellinen

Case Against Scaling

Back to basics with your enterprise transformation

Sami Lilja

Reaktor Twitter: @samililja


The Beef


Solving the wrong problem

Source: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/806573


The problem is not that we lack ways to scale Agile.

The problem is not that we fail with Agile in large organizations.

The problem is that we are large. Size does matter.

Scaling Agile?


Is it just a coincidence that Scale rhymes with Fail? *)

*)Inspired by @AgileBorat in Twitter


Economy of Scale

Scalability

Size

Co

st

of

over

head

Sublinear = Scales well

Highly repeatable “How many?”


Labor-intensive work


Knowledge work?


Intermission: FAQ •  Do you say that companies should not grow?

–  No, I am not saying that •  Do you say companies should only do small

things? –  No, I am not saying that –  But.. small batches are better than large batches

•  Are you against the frameworks that promise Agility in large-scale? –  No, I am against being large. –  However, the frameworks take “large scale” as given and

do very little to reduce that

•  Do you say that all projects and organizations could be scaled down to be more Agile? –  Yes, but this is not mandatory –  Survival is not mandatory, either


When doing development work in Large Scale, the key question is not

“How?” – it is “Why?”


Organizations getting bigger


Pear-shape organizations


What makes us Big? Large organization or

project

Fear of transparency

“We need lot of different competences”

“Relative overhead is smaller”

Complex systems

Separating action, feedback, knowledge and

decision making

Big projects need lot of people need big

projects need …

“Adding more people will speed us up”

Lot of unfinished work (WIP)

Silos in organization

(Conways’s Law)

Belief in Economies of Scale

Failure Demand

Short-term (Project) thinking


What the other say..

(A very opinionated view)


The root of all Evil I

Work-in-Progress


Work-in-Progress

•  How many things your organization is currently working on?

•  How easy it is to get dedicated people / team to deliver customer value?


Hey, but..

•  Work-in-Progress and Little’s Law are about time through system

•  What does this have to do with project size?

•  Large amount of WIP helps to create unnecessarily large projects –  When time-through-system gets long, some

organizations add more people to gain speed

–  People are split to many on-going projects, so one project needs more people


Work in Progress

•  Most organizations have too many things going on at one time, because –  People are costly: Fear of <100% resource

utilization

–  It is easier to start things than complete things

–  Large projects require lot of people require large projects require lot of people..


Work in Progress

•  We underestimate the overhead that Work-in-Progress causes

•  In reality, large WIP causes huge and costly problems –  Delays

•  time-through-system = Work-In-Progress / Velocity

–  Queues and synchronization problems

–  Internal Failure Demand •  Meetings, coordination effort, waiting, re-work, …


Sami’s Test #1

•  Think about predictable demand that comes to your organization –  Support request, deployment, creating a

new service, fixing a bug, …

•  What would be the fastest completion time, if you could do anything to make it happen?

•  If your current performance is lower, why is that? What causes delays?


Intermission

•  Project == Problem •  We encapsulate product or service

creation into a project. But that is an incorrect concept

•  project creates dysfunctions –  Hides dependencies with existing systems –  Creates a boundary that is arbitrary from

customer perspective –  Turns our attention away from customer to

project management –  Adds a new dimension of management and

control


The root of all Evil II

Failure Demand


Value demand

Adds value from customer point of view.

Something customers are willing to pay for.

This type of demand we want.

Failure demand

Failure to do what customer needs

Bad quality, wrong product or service, delay.

No product or service.

Missing either what or how customer wants

Can account up to 80% of work


All demand is considered work

Source: http://www.limebridge.com.au/page/Learning_Centre/Cartoons/


NE

W IT

SY

ST

EM

!

Failure demand: Not only bugs

Value for user

Fail

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

“PRESS 1 IF YOU CALL ABOUT..”




Internal Failure demand

Do we need this process?

What thinking created this?


Hidden Failure demand

Value Demand (Project work)

Failure Demand (Bug fixes etc)

Other

The Plan

Value Demand (Project work)

Failure Demand (Bug fixes, meetings, waiting, coordination)

Other

The reality


Dysfunction

Something in our design and management of work that is causing problems.


Institutionalized Dysfunction

Problem that was resolved by adding process or management actions and then focusing on actions rather than original problem.


Institutionalized Dysfunction and Agile Manifesto

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.

Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on

the right, we value the items on the left more.

Slippery slope to institutionalized dysfunction


Sami’s Test #2

•  Assume you could freely choose the smallest possible number of people to implement the product or service.

•  How large would that group be?

•  If it is significantly smaller than your current development project, why is that?


THE WAY OUT?


What makes us Big? Large organization or

project

Fear of transparency

“We need lot of different competences”

“Relative overhead is smaller”

Complex systems

Separating action, feedback, knowledge and

decision making

Big projects need lot of people need big

projects need …

“Adding more people will speed us up”

Lot of unfinished work (WIP)

Silos in organization

(Conways’s Law)

Belief in Economies of Scale

Failure Demand

Short-term (Project) thinking

None of these are Laws of Nature. None of these are imposed on you.

These are the results of thinking.

And we can get rid of these if we

want.


Large Scale is a System Condition.

It is a result of thinking by those who decide how work is designed and

managed.

As a system condition, it has major impact on the performance.

And since it is man made, it can be changed.

Large Scale


Putting things in perspective

•  Up to 80% of work in organization is Failure Demand

–  What if you could get rid of it? Or reduce it?

•  Significant amount of work in project is caused by large amount of WIP

–  What if that disappears as well?

•  Keep in mind the pear-shape organization and super-linear cost of scaling…

•  Reducing project size by X% decreases costs by a lot more than X%


Sami’s Test #3

•  OK, let’s assume you’ve done everything to limit WIP, remove failure demand and reduce complexity

•  Still your project is Large(-ish) .. At least 3x bigger than “by-the-book” Agile project

•  Doing things in large scale is the only option. And you want to do it Agile.

•  Have you done a very successful small end-to-end Agile project before attempting a large scale Agile project?


But hey, …

•  “You are overreacting. We all know large scale may not be the best solution. But it is usually unavoidable. And it works”


It is not perfect but it works

If it works, don’t fix it - American Car manufacturers, 1970s


•  Squads, chapters, tribes, guilds …

•  Most important is thinking!

Alignment

Autonomy

“Structure happens!”

Example of new thinking


Summary

•  Attempts to do knowledge work in large scale are likely to fail –  …or at least they are suboptimal way to create

products and services

•  Main reasons for being large –  Lot of parallel work-in-progress

–  Inability to see and remove failure demand: both external and internal

–  Fear of fast feedback and immediate visibility

•  Large Scale is a System Condition –  System conditions can be changed


One more thing..


solving the right problem?

We are engineers. We are trained to solve problems.


In order to improve radically, we need to do more than just solve problems.

We have start looking at problems from a completely new perspective.


Ways to deal with a problem

Absolution: ignore a problem and hope it will solve itself or go away of its own accord.

Resolution: employ behavior previously used in similar situations, adapted if necessary, so as to obtain an outcome that is good enough.

solution: discover or create behavior that yields the best, or approximately the best, possible outcome, one that "optimizes" the situation.

Dissolution: redesign the system or its environment in such a way that it eliminates the problem or the conditions that caused it

http://results2match.com/ackoff-again-4-different-ways-of-solving-a-problem




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The Case Against Scaling Agile