Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Agile Series: Do companies note the skill change required for Agile development ? (post 1)

I have been thinking of writing on my Agile experience for the past couple of years. Of-course i have not been Agile on this. Fortunately now after the festival of Sankranti (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makar_Sankranti) which is celebrated in India and marks the beginning of Sun's northward journey, i have finally made up my mind  to start blogging regularly. I will articulate my reflections which is an outcome of trying to build the agile consulting practice for my employer.

My first tryst with agile software development was in 2007. It seems long time back. The consulting project then was to help the enterprise project management office of a large oil major to develop an approach to adopt agile development. They had a phase gate approach. The typical challenges that was in front of me were

  • Develop an approach that captures the best practices of the gated model
  • Minimize the challenges of organization change management
  • The impact of agile on existing outsourcing contracts

In this blog i want to articulate my view on impact of agile on outsourcing contracts which are biased towards offshoring. Such cost centered contracts drive a certain behavior which does not facilitate agile development. Discussing all areas of impact that Agile development calls for is beyond the scope of this post. Here i want to focus on one important aspect which is not given the required importance. It is about 'People'. I want to take the liberty to quote from A.G Lafley's and R.L Martin book "Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works" . They make a point that "Leaders at all levels of the company need to be capable strategists and capable operators"When i read this statement it just clicked for me. This is very much applicable to organizations and teams trying to implement agile. 

In Agile teams we need all stakeholders and mainly developers and testers to develop an end to end feel or intuition for the product being developed. This will enable them to think along with the product owner to develop a product road map with technical inputs. Product owner will not have to spend too much time in explaining the intent of requirements or product. Team will be able to make decisions on their own and explain the benefit or impact to product owner. This removes the bottleneck that gets created due to non availability of product owners. This understanding will also help developers and testers to work with support functions like release management or operations to develop release plans. Release plans developed with this learning will truly be logical increments of the product. Such logical increments will also facilitate easy use of techniques like continuous integration and continuous testing. 

This sought of ability to think both strategically and translate that into operational sprints and release plans needs considerable improvement and scaling of people skills. Are customers and outsourcing vendors looking into this seriously. Do the current hiring techniques, training techniques, appraisal techniques support this change? Is there enough focus on developing strategic capability of people at all levels? What is the impact of this on operating margins and rates? So, there is a need to shift from a cost centered outsourcing towards a Value realization mode.

To conclude, it is important for all stakeholders to understand and put people at the center of the contracting discussions. This is not only good for people but also good for balance sheet and for sustained competitive advantage.




3 comments:

Unknown said...

Prakash, nice thought to bring focus on people and their capabilities (Strategy & Operation) level thinking.., In practical still our project people (at least service providers) are bounded to think on time or not, and task is completed or not and Within cost. Most of our companies recruitment model itself focus on individual contributor “What you accomplished for so and so..,” ..When whole industry is moving on Agile at all level from Recruitment, Induction, Training, Delivery, Appraisal etc., “Organization Operating model to Agile” not only emphasizing delivery also support functions., INPUTS are one of the major influencing factors for expected OUTPUTS..then I THINK this paradigm shift will happen..!!!

Unknown said...
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Abhishek Bhaumik said...

I agree with Prakash that an important aspect of successful Agile development or implementation is People. But I often face it difficult to motivate developers and testers with the need or requirements of Product Owner. Often the developers prefers waterfall model a more relaxed approach where they do not have to give regular updates and individual responsibility for a task/requirement. It will be good if you write a blog on this topic of motivating people or people management. Thanks.