Scaling for business agility — the story beyond Agile

About a few years back, we decided to pilot Agile (specifically Scrum and Kanban) for some of our business and technology initiatives at Yarra Valley Water. The drivers were not very different from usual — better outcomes, earlier delivery of high value… and it did pay off. We hit some key goals with regulatory and mandatory changes, which set a good baseline for future projects and initiatives.

The journey ahead looked exciting, and we also learnt on the way — specific to our business and industry context. Of those learnings, one of our biggest “Aha!”s has been that in addition to what an agile framework brings on board — the real value lay in improving “agility” — the inherent human sense that principally calls for (some life examples):

• Lifting optimally, and more often at the gym, rather than powerlifting once a year
• Running slow, short runs couple of times a week, rather than breaking speed and endurance running records everyday
• Sketching/ drawing/ painting simple pieces more often, rather than aiming to create the perfect masterpiece once a couple of years

It was evident how the principles of agility were based on the Yin and Yang philosophy of striking a balance between too slow and too fast, too light and too heavy, absolute barebones and absolute perfect! Some would just call it using common sense.

Why is that important? Well many a times in the world of agile, even experienced practitioners have been found guilty of demanding “the right way to do agile”. Trouble with that is, if one gets too precious about the way of doing agile, that secretly erodes their agility away. Fortunately for us, our culture at Yarra pushes us to be open and accepting to ideas beyond preset norms, we were hence lucky to bear this difference in mind right from the start.

As we get better with harnessing the Yin and Yang of agility, we observe that something magical has started to happen- it is easier to start new work, there is lesser ‘what if’ pressure of failure, outcomes are easier to predict, and we don’t have to work away on this all in isolation — many of our colleagues join in and help in the sheer spirit of teamwork! That really is cool.

Agility also pointed out many areas with potential for improvements to us — the primary one being that our overall approach to planning and investing in technology changes could benefit from leveraging the same agility principles. We hence decided to trial the SAFe 4.0 framework in our business context to improve our overall agility. SAFe 4.0 provides a proven guide on how to sycnhronize agile teams into being a ‘team of teams’ — so we can build a LEAN-agile culture that always takes an economic view and an enterprise approach to customer outcomes.

Guided by agility, we are on a journey that, at the end of each day, has customer outcomes at the heart of its every single step. What that means that our collective step, although won’t be “perfect”, would be headed forward with the right intent, and will continue to improve.

What barriers to agility do you see in your business, and what do you think would help overcome those?