Balancing Delivery Pressure with Agile Transformation | Antti Horelli

Summary

Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile Storytelling from the Trenches Episode: Balancing Delivery Pressure with Agile Transformation | Antti Horelli
Host: Vasco Duarte
Release Date: January 29, 2025

---

Introduction

In this compelling episode of the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast, host Vasco Duarte delves into the intricate balance between delivery pressure and Agile transformation with guest Antti Horelli. The conversation provides valuable insights into navigating Agile transformations within traditional organizational structures, highlighting real-world challenges and practical solutions.

Background of Agile Transformation

Antti Horelli begins by sharing his experience as an Agile Coach hired to spearhead an Agile transformation in a traditionally siloed organization. He describes the initial state of the company, characterized by isolated departments such as Development, QA and Testing, and Support, with minimal transparency and communication between them.

Key Points:

• Traditional Silos: Departments operated in isolation, leading to poor transparency and understanding between business and tech teams.
• Agile Introduction: The transformation began by establishing cross-functional Scrum teams to eliminate silos and foster collaboration.

Implementation Steps

Antti outlines the comprehensive steps taken to implement Agile practices within the organization:

1. Cross-Functional Teams: Transitioned to Scrum teams integrating developers, testers, and support personnel to enhance collaboration and efficiency.
2. Transparency Initiatives: Introduced a physical transparency wall in the office divided into two sections:
   • Business Funnel (Left Side): Showcased incoming sales and business projects.
   • Delivery Wall (Right Side): Displayed ongoing projects and sprint plans, providing a clear view of what development teams aimed to achieve each month.
3. Common Weekly Meetings: Held open meetings every week that included stakeholders, allowing anyone interested to join and stay informed.
4. Joint Planning Days: Implemented a joint planning day akin to PI Planning in SAFe, facilitating mid-term planning across multiple sprints.
5. Scrum of Scrums: Established a Scrum of Scrums to coordinate between different Scrum teams, ensuring alignment and resolving inter-team dependencies.

Notable Quote:

"We want to focus the summit on real life, first person stories of Agile all succeeding that inspire you to action."
— Vasco Duarte [00:01]

Challenges Faced: Balancing Delivery Pressure

As the transformation progressed, the organization encountered a critical challenge: the inception of a high-stakes, "do or die" project that necessitated a return to traditional project management practices. This shift was a direct response to the immediate pressure to deliver a significant project successfully.

Key Points:

• Do or Die Project: A major project emerged that the company deemed essential for survival, compelling a shift back to a project management-driven approach to ensure its timely delivery.
• Impact on Transformation: The reintroduction of traditional project management temporarily hindered the Agile transformation, creating tension between maintaining Agile practices and meeting urgent delivery demands.

Notable Quote:

"Balancing making change in small steps at least, and not like stagnating, but having also the stress of a big project that you really have to deliver, that was pretty tough."
— Antti Horelli [07:59]

Conflict Between Agile Transformation and Project Management

The episode delves deeper into the inherent conflict between Agile methodologies and traditional project management, especially during periods of intense delivery pressure.

Discussion Highlights:

• Organizational Trust: Management's lack of trust in the newly adopted Agile processes can lead to reverting to familiar project management methods, especially under high-stress scenarios.
• Risk Mitigation: Faced with critical deadlines, organizations might prioritize predictability and control offered by project management over the flexibility of Agile.
• Anti-Patterns: The host, Vasco Duarte, identifies a common anti-pattern where organizations treat Agile transformation as an end goal rather than a means to enhance delivery and value creation.

Notable Quote:

"Agile is a method or rather a philosophy of delivering. It's not a process you adopt, it's a philosophy of delivering."
— Vasco Duarte [10:47]

Lessons Learned and Insights

Antti reflects on the lessons gleaned from navigating the transformation amidst delivery pressures:

1. Value-Driven Agile: Emphasizes that Agile practices should serve the purpose of delivering value, not merely adhering to processes for their own sake.
2. Sustainability: While traditional project management can ensure the completion of critical projects, it may not be sustainable in the long term and can lead to burnout.
3. Integrated Practices: Even when reverting to project management for specific projects, maintaining elements of Agile (e.g., cross-functional teams, transparency) can preserve some benefits of the transformation.

Notable Quote:

"Agile or any methodology or process isn't a value in itself. We're not doing it like doing Agile to do agile, we're doing agile to create value."
— Antti Horelli [12:17]

Conclusions

The episode underscores the importance of prioritizing delivery and value creation over rigidly adhering to transformation processes. It advocates for a balanced approach where Agile methodologies are leveraged to enhance delivery, adaptability, and collaboration, rather than being treated as mere checklists to be followed.

Closing Insights:

• Start with Delivery: Focus on improving delivery outcomes first, allowing Agile practices to evolve organically based on what works.
• Adaptability: Be prepared to adapt Agile practices in response to organizational needs and external pressures without compromising the core Agile philosophy.
• Sustainable Practices: Aim for sustainable transformation by integrating Agile principles into everyday workflows, ensuring long-term benefits and minimizing burnout.

Notable Quote:

"Having a strong project manager might help in the short term, but it can be counterproductive and lead to burnout in the long run."
— Vasco Duarte [14:06]

Final Thoughts

This episode offers a nuanced exploration of the challenges and solutions involved in Agile transformations within high-pressure environments. Antti Horelli's firsthand experience provides valuable lessons for Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches aiming to navigate similar terrains, emphasizing the importance of flexibility, value-driven practices, and sustainable change.

---

Stay Tuned: For more insightful conversations and actionable advice, subscribe to the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast and join the Global Agile Summit in May 2025. Early bird tickets are available at globalagilesummit.com.

Transcript

[Pasco Duarte]

Hi there, Pasco Duarte here, your host. I wanted to share a story with you. You know how sometimes Agile just feels like following another checklist when like processes and frameworks feel more important than what we are trying to achieve and sometimes even like handcuffs. I was talking to a customer of the Global Agile Summit and he used a term that kind of stuck in my he said, I have Agile fatigue. And I've heard that a lot from people since then. But here's the thing, it doesn't have to be this way. So we started thinking and at the Global Agile Summit, which is happening this May, we're bringing together practitioners who've actually done that, who've broken free from this, you know, install the framework kind of mindset. We want to focus the summit on real life, first person stories of Agile all succeeding that inspire you to action. We're talking real experiences, practical solutions, and of course, amazing insights from leaders like Gojko Adsic, who will be one of the keynote speakers, and Jurgen Apelo, who will be one of the keynote speakers as well. If you're ready to leave the Agile fatigue behind, just join us in Dalit. The early birth tickets are now available@the globalagilesummit.com and mark your calendar. We will have workshops on May 18th, that's a Sunday. And then the conference itself will happen on May 19th and 20th of 2025 in Tallinn, Estonia. So let's make Agile exciting again. And remember, go to agile globalagilesummit.com that is, and get your early birth ticket. Now. It will only be available until early March, so grab it now. And now onto the episode.

[Anti Horelli]

Hello everybody. Welcome to our Wednesday the Leading Change episode this week with Anti Horelli. Hey Antti, welcome back.

[Antti Horelli]

Hello. Hello. Great to be here.

[Anti Horelli]

So anti change leadership is the topic of today, of course, and in that context we want you to tell us a story, a change process you were involved with and walk us through the steps like how it went from beginning to end and then highlight for us as you go the tools, the tips, the tricks, the techniques you learned back then that you still apply today.

[Antti Horelli]

Okay, so this is kind of going to be a big one. This is an Agile transformation. So some years ago I worked in organization. My to be boss there, the head of R and D, started an Agile transformation. I was hired there as a Agile coach to help with that. And where we started was a fairly kind of, how do you say, traditional or old school organization where we had development as one organizational silo QA and testing as another, support as a Third one, very little transparency or kind of big, big walls between these. Not that good understanding what will come out when what should even be the focus of things. Business didn't understand what was happening in tech. Tech and all that kind of, I guess in a way classic situation. Things that we did, we set up cross functional development teams, I think mostly scrum teams. So no more silos between for example the testers and the developers. We did try to keep the competence support. There were kind of metrics in that sense. But still. We had some scrum ceremonies going on there earlier also, but not really. It wasn't like full scrum. It wasn't the whole deal. So we enhanced that. And that was one of my big roles. I worked with the teams as a scrum master, for example, for two teams at a time and then maybe changed teams as necessary. Then on kind of the higher level we set up this big wall to create transparency. It was a physical wall. It was in the middle of the office. It had kind of two sides. On the left side we had our kind of sales and business things that are coming in. Maybe kind of a business funnel, so to speak. And that resulted in projects that were tackled by. By the delivery side. They were visible on the delivery wall where we had like on a month month base things that. What do we think that our development teams can accomplish during this month? So you could kind of see what's coming in into the through sales on the business side and what is being done and when should things be ready. And that was a huge thing. People could walk by, take a look at it. We had a common meeting around at every every week that was open for others. There was stakeholders there. Yes, but anyone could join if they wanted. Then we brought some planning structure into the situation as well. Higher level planning. We have something called joint planning day. It's maybe a little bit like PI planning in safe, a lot lighter, but still. So we did this midterm planning for let's say four sprints. Looking forward, four sprints every two sprints. So we did four sprints of planning. Then after two sprints we again did four sprints of planning. And this emphasized the change that is always happening. So we don't have one plan that we try to stick to. The plan is changing but still it gave us much better understanding of what we can accomplish and also what to communicate to everyone else. Then we had a scrum scrum between our scrums teams which is kind of maybe as usual. Yeah, that was a really big thing. A lot of change. A lot of patience was needed there for everyone involved, a lot of small things to iron out, a lot of new processes for everyone, new ways of working for everyone and so on. But I think one big learning there for me at least was that, because I was kind of very much looking at the change aspect here and that was very important for me also emotionally then. But at the same time we were doing the change, we still had to make a profit, of course. And during this time our company was given a very important project, a very big, big project, which kind of turned out to be kind of a do or die thing. So we, we were. Failure was not a possibility. So in, in that situation, balancing making change in small steps at least, and not like stagnating, but having also the stress of a big project that you really have to deliver, that was pretty tough. And we did our change kind of went back, back a little bit even. We had kind of a. When our big do or die project looked, looked like it might be in jeopardy, we kind of took a very hardcore project management drive to take care of that project, which kind of set us back in our agile transformation a bit. But still some of the elements were there. And then we move forward after that. But that, at least for me as a person making the change was like.

[Anti Horelli]

Contrast and conflict between delivering something concrete like this do or die project, as you call it, and then the overall agile transformation is an interesting factor and something that I'm personally interested in because I see a lot of organizations kind of going towards agile and then retreating back to project management. Now I fully understand why the organizations do that, because they believe that project managers will deliver things or will make things be delivered, I guess we could call it. But that is not my experience. So I'm a bit confused as to why do we get into that belief. In fact, my own experience is that the opposite is that project management makes things slower, more complex and harder to deliver, while agile typically makes things faster, more end to end, integrated and easier to deliver. So in that particular story, Antti, what was in place that led the leaders of that organization to believe that bringing in a project management mindset would help deliver with, I guess, more predictability?

[Antti Horelli]

Yeah, very, very nice question. Kind of in the core of Agile in a sense. I can't really speak for our higher management. I don't know exactly. So I'm guessing here. So this is kind of my, my point of view, my best guess is as to why this happened. But a couple of things. First of all, we were still kind of in the middle of our transformation when this need for really delivering happened. So we weren't really, we were kind of still maybe paying the price of learning new things a bit in efficiency and especially we didn't have a track record of showing efficiency yet. So I'm thinking that to hire management this kind of looked like they couldn't trust that if we continue on this path, good things will happen. I would also guess that maybe the more traditional project management approach is something that they environment were more used to. It wasn't an agile organization before that. We were just creating the change so they didn't have success stories kind of to rely on. Again, a trust issue maybe, or maybe just a risk issue like they balanced it. That okay, there are these promises about agile, but we haven't seen them be delivered yet. Maybe we can't like bet on this if it's the whole kind of company on the line. So maybe we go back to what we know works.

[Anti Horelli]

Yeah. This actually highlights what I think is a very common anti pattern in agile transformations, which is to start from the transformation end rather than starting from the delivery end. Right. Because at the end of the day Agile is there to help us deliver value faster in a more coherent way. Meaning that there are people working together rather than somebody somewhere writing specs and then kind of handing it over the wall and then expecting that magically something happens and then having a puppet master, also known as a project manager. And I'm a project manager here, so I know pretty much what's expected of project managers to kind of make things happen. Right. And for me the anti pattern is exactly this perspective that the goal of Agile transformation is to deliver Agile to the organization. And I see that as a shifting and erroneous shifting of the goal because in fact Agile is a method or rather a philosophy of delivering. It's not a process you adopt, it's a philosophy of delivering. So in my mind we should always start with the delivery.

[Antti Horelli]

Right.

[Anti Horelli]

Like the work that we need to do in order to make sure that we start delivering earlier. Right. And discovering therefore, you know, what works, what doesn't work and adapting. How do you see it? Anti.

[Antti Horelli]

Yeah, that is very well said. I absolutely agree. I think Agile or any methodology or process isn't a value in itself. We're not doing it like doing Agile to do agile, we're doing agile to create value, to be able to do something, something useful, better, more efficiently, whatever it is. So yeah, absolutely like that. I think in this story a lot of things we had already put in place like for example, cross functional teams, transparency into what's happening, like from end to end when we are building this, those were used in the kind of when we went back into the project management or stronger project management side. So in that sense a lot of the benefits were used there. I think also one thing was that we had this very strong project manager come in and I think one thing he did is that he really did make the project go through. He was a very strong person. He was kind of able to force everyone to do enough to make it happen. And from the company point of view and from the project point of view, this was good because it made sure that this very critical thing got done. From the companies like long term working point of view, it wasn't sustainable. So even though it was a big project, if it had been even longer, then bad things would have started to happen as well. But maybe this was a choice from the project manager. I can't say that's a very good.

[Anti Horelli]

Point because that take charge, make things happen might be in the short term even feasible. I would argue is probably counterproductive. But I have a different philosophy. Having been on both sides, project management and agile, I have a different philosophy. But I can totally understand why people would think that bringing in a strong project manager would help get things delivered. But of course there's the problem that even if they do get delivered, you will burn out people.

[Antti Horelli]

Yes, exactly.

[Pasco Duarte]

That's a great story, Anthony. Thank you for sharing.

[Antti Horelli]

Yeah, thank you.

[Pasco Duarte]

We really hope you liked our show. And if you did, why not rate this podcast on Stitcher or itunes, Share this podcast and let other Scrum masters know about this valuable resource for their work.

[Anti Horelli]

Remember that sharing is caring.