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Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
BONUS: The Future of Agility: Data-Driven Insights With Simon Powers
00:45:04
BONUS: The Future of Agility, Insights from Industry Research with Simon Powers Is Agile really dead? What does this wide research from industry reveal? In this detailed, and insightful episode, we explore the current state and future of...
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- [00:02]
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 Gojkoacic, 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. Hello everybody. Welcome to this very special bonus episode. For today's bonus episode, we're discussing the future of Agility report that Simon is collecting. And Simon is here with us. Hey Simon. Welcome to the show.
- [02:20]
Simon Powers
Brilliant. Thank you for inviting me. Very excited. It's been a while. Thank you.
- [02:25]
Pasco Duarte
Absolutely. Simon Powers is the founder of the Deeper Change Academy and author of Change a Practitioner's Guideline to Enterprise coaching. With over 20 years of leadership experience, Simon empowers HR leaders and department heads to create thriving human centered workplaces through tailored coaching, strategic advisory and transformational programs. And Simon's been working since last year on a survey and a report from the survey that would help frame our thinking and ideas regarding where Agile is at now. And also, what are the. The, I guess we could call it future trend. So I'd say there's a great time to have this conversation, especially since what happened at the end of last year when PMI and Agile alliance merged. So I'm really curious Simon, let's start by reviewing a little bit the context of your survey. So what got you started? What were your goals when you started collecting data for your report?
- [03:25]
Simon Powers
So this last 18 months I think has been especially challenging for those of us who work full time in, in change management. So this is Scrum Masters, Agile coaches, perhaps more formal change management as well in terms of traditional sort of project management type things. And over the last 18 months there's been a significant decline in the number of people being qualified in this profession and the number of job roles that we keep seeing on the market. Perhaps you have friends, perhaps perhaps you know colleagues, perhaps you yourself have had a job role change or a loss of job. And it's really trying to make sense of this change that's happened over this last 18 months. Why is this happening? And the survey data really. And it was so there's survey data, there's in depth case studies and also interviews with senior leaders, plus a bit of research on the web in terms of job losses and economy indicators and tying this together to make sense of what's happening in our world. Why is this, you know, what's this phenomenon?
- [04:31]
Pasco Duarte
And I think that's a very worthwhile endeavor especially because of course for many of us it's tied to our livelihood. Right. It's not a trifle matter. It's a very important topic for us to have some in depth understanding. What were some of the key findings that you think relate exactly to that trend? Right, like less people getting trained, less people getting jobs that are titled as agile roles. What were the key findings from this survey, Simon?
- [05:01]
Simon Powers
Yeah, brilliant. So the, so let's start with some of the macro things in the world. So this decline really started in or change, I should say started really 10-23-ish. Around then there was a noticeable decline in number of certifications of people wanting to be qualified, the number of people starting in this industry. And so I started looking back at some of those factors. So we see that there are a number of macro changes. Then the Israel, Palestine conflict for want of war or whatever you want to call it is really kicked off at that time. We've got the Russia, Ukraine war that's happening there. We had in this country. We are really only starting to see the effect of Brexit. We've got of course the pandemic, the things that kicked off really the tail end of that was hitting us there and also the launch of AI as a consumable resource that Organizations are looking at in terms of productivity. There's also a number of other factors in terms of the amount of money available through quantitative tightening and things like this. So all of these things have led to a very volatile situation for large enterprises and governments and there's been less cash in the system, lots of change, disruption to supply lines, and a general anxiety of fear and change that's in the air. So if you look at all of these different factors, then organizations are very reluctant to take on more change, to put more perceived change in the system. Plus this idea that AI can deliver a lot more productivity. There has been a big shift from L and D spending, from people spending, of how do we collaborate, how do we work together to can we educate ourselves and use AI for productivity gains. So there's been a lot of reduction in human change and for all those reasons.
- [07:07]
Pasco Duarte
Yeah. Well, one of the things that is interesting, not necessarily in a good way, of course, but one of the things that is interesting is that there's a lot of investment in AI. In fact, when it comes to money being spent on AI related projects that's going up, there's quite a few, we could call it the early winners of the AI wave. I mean, there's a lot of waves coming from AI. This is just really the very beginning that are clearly showing big growth in that area. We know, for example, that Microsoft has been laying off people and reinvesting that money in AI initiatives. So we see a lot of that and we could even say that we saw the same when Agile came about and started to go mainstream. Right. There was money that was moving from certain change initiatives into agile change initiatives. But is there anything in the data that tells us about the actual use of Agile in the world? Right, because one thing is to say, okay, there's less Scrum Master or Agile Coach roles. By the way, in Finland we see the opposite trend now in the beginning of the year 2025, we see more Scrum Master roles coming up. But of course that's anecdotal and it's only one market. But, but are there, is there data in your survey that kind of points us to what is the actual use, the actual state of the Agile adoption worldwide?
- [08:40]
Simon Powers
Yeah, that's brilliant. And I think that there's a key point you made there about when we talk about worldwide. There isn't a homogenous worldwide trend. Regions do operate differently and that's an important factor. So let's bear that in mind when we, we probably will be talking about global changes and things, but they there is that regional difference and it's worth remembering that. So in terms of the data actually shows that most organizations are still working in an agile way and looking to increase their agile usage and their ways of working. They are still looking at change programs or what we would call an agile transformation, but they're not using those words so much anymore. So roughly 70% of the organizations that I spoke to are continuing to invest in significant upgrades to their human process and which we would call an agile transformation. So I was surprised at this mainly because I have been probably many people listening here get a lot of their information about what's going on from LinkedIn. So when you're reading all those LinkedIn posts and those comments and we're trolling through these things, we get these very extreme views. Agile is dead, Agile is no more. And that simply isn't the case. But what is changing is the way that people are engaging with agile transformations, what they're called, and the way that people are being employed with agile knowledge. So that's really key. So when we are seeing a reduction in agile coaches, that doesn't necessarily mean a reduction in the way that agile is being used in organizations.
- [10:21]
Pasco Duarte
Is there like or by the way, because you also did case studies and you also did interviews, did you get some insights as to how that was being done? Right, like, because at the same time, when you say, okay, there's less agile coach or scrum roles in some regions, but there's expectation of more investment into the way people work together, collaboration and agile adoption, like those two things don't go together. So what roles are there that will eventually put that into practice?
- [10:53]
Simon Powers
Well, so the not so good news is that what's coming out from almost all the case studies and a vast majority of the survey results is that companies are focusing very much on operational efficiencies and thinking that this is where what agile is. So agile roles are moving into Agile delivery managers, agile project managers. You know, it's the stick of the word agile in front of any of the traditional role names and you might get an idea. However, there is, it's not quite as straightforward as that because there is an expectation to do some kind of iterative learning through the operational delivery. What I'm not seeing, and this is where I think the real shortfall is of not having agile coaches in specific roles, is that there is very little strategy work going on, almost no vision or purpose work. Leadership development, which is such a crucial part of any change program, is seemingly stalled. There seems to be quite a Lack of knowledge around what agile actually is in terms of delivery. So when people are doing these agile transformations without the support of coaches and dedicated agile people, it seems that they have taken on a very shallow version of what agility is and focusing mainly on efficiencies rather than what we'd hope for, which is a bit of a cultural anti fragility kind of exercise throughout the whole organization. Instead, it's very operational, very functional, get the stuff out the door quicker, which isn't really the spirit of agility.
- [12:35]
Pasco Duarte
Well, okay, so one thing that is interesting from what you just shared is one of the transformations that Agile mindset, if you will, so if you look at the agile values the agile mindset brings is this idea that that software is all about collaboration and that collaboration cannot be strictly planned upfront. Therefore we need to be able to respond to change. And of course, all of those things, collaboration, responding to change, they are all leadership aspects, right? Like you can't ask individual contributors on their own to organically figure out how to collaborate. I mean, they will eventually, but they need guidance, they need vision, and they need support most of all. This is a worrying trend that you described, that there's less investment on leadership development, which is, at least in my experience, one of the true unlockers of agile adoption. When leaders are ready to give the support and support the collaborative approaches that agile approaches, agile frameworks, bring with them, and when we think a little bit about the future, this of course makes me worried about the sustainability of these agile adoptions. And I'll give a concrete example. I've heard from some places the same things that you've heard, of course, like for example, teams that used to have a manager eventually had a scrum master and a product owner. The manager is still there, but they're probably handling 5, 10, whatever number of teams. Google very famously said they want one line manager for 100 and some, I don't remember the exact number, but 100 plus individual contributors. So you need to have leadership on the ground floor. You can't have leadership in the marble tower. So what are you seeing companies doing and reflecting and maybe even already coming up with ideas in your survey about how to overcome this lack of leadership development.
- [14:46]
Simon Powers
So what I'm seeing is two very different types of organization. Those that haven't got an answer to that, and they seem to be going around in this cycle of ever more delivery, delivery efficiencies, and really what I would consider a lack of agility is growing. And so there's the type of company that hasn't mastered that they don't have the answer to how do we unlock this leadership? Leadership seems to be disengaged or not part of anything to do. The Agile process, they don't get it. They don't see why they should be involved. It's delegated to a lower level in the hierarchy that perhaps doesn't have the authority to make the necessary changes to bring about agility. And so this is where there are high burnout. The well being of staff is reducing and the turnovers of people working there is quite high. So there's a lot of staff loss. So this is like a downward spiral. So that's one type of company I'm seeing. They haven't figure this out. The other type of company are addressing this and there is some leadership development or there is at least what we, you know, the old Agile bubble, as you were, of people who have kind of got a bit of it and they are trying the best within the organization to grow the. I'm seeing there were a few, there weren't many actually, I can't remember what percentage off the top of my head, but there were some who had embraced coaching as a management tool. So I really liked that. And companies that we've worked with personally who have embraced coaching as a management tool, they don't have to. Managers don't have to be like fully qualified coaches. But just using that as a tool have enabled better collaboration. There is a correlation also, which many people won't like me saying this, quite controversial, but the amount of days in the office versus working from home. So it seems from the survey data, certainly from the managers, coaches, change agents who have responded that the optimal level of collaboration being in the same space versus being completely virtual is somewhere between two and three days a week in the office. Generally the feeling is that being at home 100% of the time is a big reduction of collaboration and working on things and growing these skill sets that are needed in leadership as well as within the teams. So there's a number of different factors which enable or disable leadership engagement. Namely, are people together, are people engaged, what is the knowledge of leaders? There are also often how. This is an interesting one as well, how the transformation is funded, where is that budget set? So in companies where they have a centralized budget which is funding, sometimes people call it a center of excellence. I don't particularly like that term. I prefer center of enablement or something where we've got a group of people who are enabling change to happen, they're shepherding a change with Their knowledge within the company helping where things get stuck, if that's centrally funded, those people tend to be able to unlock some of these leadership challenges much better. Where the funding is a headcount within departments, where the headcount is a change agent, such an Agile coach or a scrum master full time, which is competing against other full time positions such as a developer or product owner or a marketing person or whatever, those tend to be less effective and are not able to really drive that or say drive the change, but shepherd that change through. So that's another key factor.
- [18:35]
Pasco Duarte
What do you think is causing that?
- [18:39]
Simon Powers
The budgeting part or the.
- [18:41]
Pasco Duarte
No, no. I mean, so you talked about how the different ways of funding the Agile transformation have these direct consequences. But of course then one would say okay, but if the transformation isn't progressing, why wouldn't we change the way we fund it? But that isn't happening in some organization. What is keeping organizations stuck in that? I don't know, we could call it less change friendly way of funding the transformation.
- [19:08]
Simon Powers
Yeah, and it really does come down to something that you mentioned earlier, which is that leadership is such an important part of any transformation program or change management program and where people are hired or paid for within the headcount, the overwhelming like 90% of people who are in that position are reporting that they do not have the authority to actually carry out the roles that they have responsibility for. So they've got a bunch of responsibilities as part of their job role, but they don't have the authority to actually see it through. So they're constantly asking or in some cases have given up and are now focusing on a much smaller scope of transformation which is either their peers or below them in the hierarchy because they're employed as, as a headcount in that hierarchy part in a department in a, in a particular silo function. And so they're unable to do that, which means that they don't generally, the leadership doesn't generally see the efforts that they're doing or the efforts that they are doing is so much smaller that it doesn't concern them at the level that they're at. Whereas when the budgets are held, essentially they're normally accountable to a senior leadership team. Normally either depending on the size of the company, could be one below the board, could even be the board level in smaller companies and they're much more visible and so they get the support and engagement of the leading, the backing of the senior leadership team and they're able to be much more effective. One last thing on that is that the culture is very different depending on where you sit. Because if you're constantly competing against a headcount of a developer versus that you're fairly safe in your job, you're a little bit more able to take the necessary risks, talk to the right people, do more bolder experiments, and perhaps have more of an effect within the organization.
- [20:58]
Pasco Duarte
Another thing that I'm interested in, this is a trend that I've seen in some companies and I don't know if this is happening to those that you did interviews or case studies or even if anything came up in the survey data. But one trend that I've seen is this, let's call it the swing. And just as an anecdotal evidence, there's a local company that I know and I know people work there that are in their third Agile transformation. They started an agile transformation, they eventually stopped it, went back to project management, then stopped that, did a second agile transformation. Now they're in their third agile transformation. Do you have any data, any insights from that survey and interviews that would help explain this swing effect?
- [21:48]
Simon Powers
Yeah, so I'm just trying to think of the actual data. I've got an opinion about why I think that is in terms of actual data. People are changing the names now of things. Agile transformation isn't used as much as it used to be. Even the word agile is not used as much. I think I can only go on, as you say, anecdotal evidence of why this happens. From my own experience, 20 years of change management and that is that all things go in cycles. Nothing lasts forever. And what we have is we have a bunch of people who are typically in difficult and challenging roles which are by definition have to be one step ahead of the organization. We're always, as change management, looking to the next thing, how do we grow? And as a human race, we are continually learning about better ways to do things. And as the world changes around us, the complexity increases, the speed at which our products need to be developed and the lifetime of the products, the cost of the products increases. And yet people want cheaper and cheaper products from a consumer perspective. So it's harder and harder. So the things that might have worked 15 years ago simply aren't applicable now. And so when a new thing comes out, people want recognition for the new thing. This is Agile 2.0. This is Agile 3.0. They want recognition for this new step forwards. And so typically the names change and the approach changes and the people change. And so I'm really seeing this as a continual stream of improvement in our own change management practices, which enable us to meet organizations with the current complexities and challenges they have. So just because one particular type of wording or particular approach is now perhaps being less used, complexity and change is never going away. So yeah, keep going.
- [23:56]
Pasco Duarte
Yeah. One of the things that you said, like everything goes in cycles. I think it is a very important realization for us to absorb and then transform into something concrete that affects us and help us to make decisions in our day to day. So for example, I was. Because of course there were people on LinkedIn saying, oh, scrum master jobs are going down. So I did some research, I went to Google Trends and I started looking at some of the data and we can clearly see the cycles. It's a little bit like the stock market, right? Like sometimes stocks go up, sometimes stocks go down. And it doesn't necessarily relate to the actual underlying performance of the company that issues those stocks. It can be just because of other trends that are outside the company itself. And when it comes to Agile adoption, I remember in the early 2000s, before Agile was a thing where I lived in Finland at the time, there was another trend that was called Lean eventually that was also part of the software and agile trend. So Lean Software Development by Mary Poppendick. Check out the episode that we did with them a few years back. And I could see that trend also happening with Lean that at some point there was a lot of hype and everybody wanted to do Lean. And then at some point then Lean wasn't that interesting anymore and it was seen quite negatively. I remember people talking about Lean adoption initiatives as just firing people. We adopt Lean so we can fire people. Just like, for example, today people are talking about AI that way, right? Like we adopt AI just to fire people. And I think that this understanding of that cycle being part really invites or being part of any adoption, any change, any transformation really invites us to consider how we are bringing ourselves to work and what kind of work we would like to do. Because at the end of the day, it needs to benefit someone. And even that doesn't guarantee you will get the job forever. But it needs to benefit someone, whoever that might be, either the customer or the manager. Russell Lakoff famously said that companies exist to benefit the inner circle of those companies, and that the inner circle of the companies is defined by those who benefit from the existence of the company. Right? And all we want is that inner circle to be as wide as possible. And that's not necessarily always possible. And there's going to be this oscillation. And in this Anecdotal evidence, I was referring to this company that is in their third agile transformation. I can also relate to the fact that their CTO changed and then they went back to project management and that CTO either got fired or maybe saw the light and that CTO did another Agile transformation. So we also need to be aware of that, right? Like it's not always going to be down, it's not always going to be up, there will be these cycles.
- [27:05]
Simon Powers
It reminds me of a quote from Frederic Lelot's book, which many people would probably be familiar with, is that an organization rises or falls to the level of consciousness of its leaders and we see leaders leave and come. And many times I've seen an incredible agile transformation go. And the reason why it's disappeared and gone is because the cxo, whoever sponsored it, has had such fantastic results, they've got poached by somebody else. The existing team brought in somebody else who didn't get it, didn't want it, didn't understand why we can't go back to doing things the good old ways and sacked all the agile coaches and everything's collapsed back down to predict and control type behaviors. There is another factor in this as well, which I'll be careful how I speak about it, but there are certain consultancies, certain frameworks which lend themselves to a shallow understanding of the complexities of people dynamics and the way that change is brought in and then the effects that it can have. So by people who can sort of learn something in a couple of days, have no real understanding of the complexities of organizations, can then come and sort of roll out frameworks. Then this can also give the title of Agile a very bad name because inevitably someone with three days experience and a framework behind them, which they're selling certifications off the back of, can then cause actually more damage to a system, to an organization than perhaps if they'd never started. And people walk away from that saying, oh, I've been in an agile transformation and I saw what carnage that had. No way, I'm never doing that again. And so this slowly spreads and of course bad news travels better than good news. So, you know, this is another factor in, in why people are sort of thinking, you know, what's next? What's the next thing after Raja?
- [29:07]
Pasco Duarte
Which I think is a great segue for our last question of this conversation, Simon. So of course we need to look a little bit towards the future and think about as an agile community. What does this mean? What can we make out of this and how should we act? Maybe some ideas for what we could do. So let's dive into that, do a little bit of futurology of course, informed futurology. After all, Simon, you've been in the industry forever, right? Almost literally when you look at the results of the survey and you're just now writing the final report. For those of you listening to us in the future, the report is linked to in the show notes, so make sure that you check that out. So what are your thoughts in how the future of agility develops? And I'm here more interested specifically in the software industry. Of course agile is being used in many other industries, but let's for the time being focus on the software industry. What do you see the future of agility holds within that context of the software industry?
- [30:15]
Simon Powers
Yeah, brilliant. So let's look at short term to start with and short term to start with and the Initially I see that as a general across, I mean different organizations slightly differently, but as a general thing in the future I do believe that we are in slight confusion here within our organizations about how to deliver Software. Still even 2025, I mean I'm still seeing organizations who haven't got their test, automated test platform sorted, they haven't got their continuous delivery, they are still working in a way which is very siloed with siloed teams who cannot deliver values for the customer. So there is confusion in, in what agility really meant, which was the ability to deliver short pieces of value or to reduce risk and be able to learn from that and adapt. Still organizations are not doing that mainly because they don't have the technology platforms to enable them. The team structures are not set up to enable agility to work. And finally they don't have the cultures of collaboration based upon leadership, understanding and the ability to, to hold space for people to collaborate effectively and have good ideas. Oh, and the other factor of course is entrepreneurial product ownership is still in many companies a dream and a myth. Whereas really that is an absolutely integral part of any agile transformation or working or we could call it working with complexity or modern day organizations. So these things are, these problems which agility was brought about to address are still there in most organizations. They're not going away. And the as complexity increases, as it will do as software gets more advanced, as we get faster with the advent of AI. So AI just basically means we can do things a lot quicker. So we've got more speed, more stuff going on. We've got people who are now distributed all over the place, working from the root remains of the COVID experience. So we've got all of this challenge, none of that is going away. And we have very, very good tools and tried and tested approaches through this bucket umbrella called Agile that solves those problems. So what I'm seeing is that organizations are having a little bit of a break from all of this kind of big agile transformation programs, et cetera. But inevitably this will return, and I believe it will return probably again crystal ball time. Within 6 months ish the latter half of this year, I think we're going to see a big uptake. I don't know what it's going to be called, I don't know what the names will be, but organizations are going to need to sort out these problems that we've been slowly sorting out through agility for the last 20 years. We're just going to be continuing on. But what flavor I don't know.
- [33:17]
Pasco Duarte
So I'm a big fan of Gibson's quote, the future is already here, just not evenly distributed. And when I look at what's happening out there now, I'd be interested to hear from you how that shows up in your survey and your case studies and interviews. When I look at what's going on out there, I see things like mob programming or ensemble work or software teaming, as Woody's will these days calls it. I see DevOps, which was a big trend a few years ago, but that trend is not going anywhere because it delivers clear results and more and more companies are adopting those practices. I see team topologies, of course. I see the scaling frameworks that are being adopted, many of them still very much in vogue and being applied in many organizations today. I see what maybe one could call the building blocks to the creation of a new approach of managing software work. And the new approach in contrast to project management, which is a linear, plan driven approach to managing software. And if I put those trends together, the first thing that comes to mind is, okay, then the next step is no longer what does a team do? Scrum and Kanban have sorted that out quite clearly already, but rather what does a multitude of teams do? And then we can talk about different orders of magnitude. Is it two teams or 20 teams? Is it 20 or 200? You and I both have worked in programs that had hundreds of teams, and we clearly saw that project management was not sustainable from any perspective. Not from testing, not from development, not from commanding and controlling, which was the overarching promise of project management. So what I'm thinking is maybe the next agile transformation is how the leadership and the structure of management adopts these ideas and transforms them into something very practical. I don't know what it will be called, I forget her name now, but we had a speaker at Rebecca Humpkeys at the Agile Online Summit talking about how agility needs to get to the strategy level. And she's not coming from software, right? Like she's a writer and teacher or professor in strategy and business business. So totally different perspective from what we would have as software people. But maybe that's the trend that I see, right? Like in the Agile community, we're slowly building the Lego blocks, if you will, that will eventually allow company management and company leadership to start adopting also Agile practice. What do you think about that, Simon?
- [36:09]
Simon Powers
I think that's a brilliant summary and very thorough. I think that's fantastic. Looking at this data, the case studies, specifically with the detailed knowledge, the key linchpin of this, which is really holding us back and you know, I don't want to put it in one group, but I'm afraid I'm putting it on one group, is that we really have a lack of leadership in organizations. And when I say lack of leadership, I mean true leadership beyond management. I'm talking about people who can hold space, people who have a vision and then off the back of that vision and the people they've got create strategy. As you've exactly said there. And there is, if you look at the Agile frameworks and I've done this, I've gone through all the Agile frameworks, there's actually only two instances where the Agile frameworks really even touch on strategy. They've known real vision, organizational vision. So we've got a bunch of frameworks which are organized at the operational delivery, get stuff done level, even though it was about getting the right thing done. And so it's not a wonder that people whose jobs are full time strategists in organizations are not picking this stuff up. So that's the key area that needs to be addressed. Agility or this ability to deal with complexity must hit those senior leaders in their strategy. I mean, better strategy tools. And then like you say, the building blocks of so you've got your strategy, you know what you want to do, how do you then organize your team structures? You mentioned team topologies. I'm not going to go particularly into all the things of that, but there are very clear method, very clear team structures which work and a whole bunch of team structures which don't. And yet I'm seeing 90% of organizations are still organized in ways with team structures which just don't make any sense from a flow perspective. They only make sense from a siloed ownership, individualistic, this is my code, no one else is touching it perspective, which doesn't work at a strategic level.
- [38:11]
Pasco Duarte
So, yeah, that's a very good point. Like this silo perspective that you just mentioned actually reminds me that when you have project, of course I'm referring to Conway's law, so let's make it explicit. And Conway said very famously that if you have, I think it was three or four, I don't remember, but if you have a three team compiler organization, you will have a three pass compiler. If you have a four team compiler organization, you will have a four pass compiler. What he was trying to verbalize, which we see, and you and I saw that firsthand, in a very large software organization, what we see is that the siloing of software teams leads to incredibly difficult to manage architectures, incredibly slow to compile or deliver or test software products. And it is about bringing those together. Of course, there are challenges of scale, and this is very important for us to accept that Scrum is a great solution, but not for 20 teams. Scrum doesn't go to 20 teams. So we need to get some inspiration of, okay, what would work for 20 teams if scrum doesn't? Right. And then there are many solutions out there in the market already trying to address that, and we can look at those. But it's very important for us to recognize that in software, we don't have the luck of compartmentalization. When we all work in one product, we all work on the same code. Now, we might, for abstraction reasons, say, I'm working on this module, you're working on that module, but at some point those modules need to come together and then we face Conway's law and we need to realize that actually software as a medium to deliver value to our stakeholders and customers requires a different organizational mindset and structure. And I think that's also part of what the Agile community needs to bring about through team topologies, through flow concepts, through some of the scaling frameworks, and more stuff that is to come that we don't know about yet.
- [40:17]
Simon Powers
Yeah, you've hit the nail on the head, really. I mean, the team structures is one of the most primary factors of whether an organization can release software iteratively, et cetera, and meet the changing demands that agility promised. And people are just not implementing sensible team structures. And that doesn't enable a strategic or whole product view to be able to be iterated. And you mentioned Conway's Law which, you know, the team structure results in a particular architecture, but when you try to change that architecture, then you're fighting against your organization.
- [40:59]
Pasco Duarte
Yeah, yeah.
- [41:00]
Simon Powers
So what we have to do is we absolutely have to decouple team structure from the architectural environment, assuming that's possible.
- [41:08]
Pasco Duarte
Of course, and we need to experiment with that.
- [41:11]
Simon Powers
And this is where there are trade offs. So the particular types of expertise that we have, if you've got, and we have data actually for this, which is when you've got a large software organization, which are the pieces of code which any software person in that organization can pick up within a day, which are the pieces which would take a week and which are the pieces which would take a month or many months because they're extremely technical. And when you do the code analysis across all of your estate and you look at which of those buckets there are the organizations in which we've done this, usually there's only about 4 or 5% of the code which is actually in the. We can't touch any of this for months and months and months. The other 95% can be picked up by pretty much anyone, which means that if you had a very strong code repository and checks and automated testing and delivery in place, then you can build teams which can pick anything off the backlog, which creates amazing flow with continuous delivery. You don't have the problem where people are arguing over which component needs to go in the backlog. You don't need a backlog, particularly because what you've got is you're just pulling stuff off that 95% of the code base can be worked upon in a tested and controlled manner so that people are producing quality. And only your lack of agility then sits within the 5%, which really needs people who are dedicated and cannot be moved around and are assigned to that piece of code full time kind of thing.
- [42:40]
Pasco Duarte
And you can create strategies to increase the, let's say, the changeability of that code effectively, if you do it deliberately and with time, you can reduce the 5% to be even less than 5% and so on.
- [42:56]
Simon Powers
Yeah, totally, absolutely. And then you can choose to have redundant people sitting on there to maximize flow so that people aren't 100% utilized, which seems to be our goal.
- [43:06]
Pasco Duarte
Basic theory of constraints, right?
- [43:08]
Simon Powers
Constraints, Exactly.
- [43:10]
Pasco Duarte
And I think this conversation just highlights how important it is for us as a community, the software community. I mean now to really realize that we have to look outside software for inspiration, but we have to take responsibility over what we do within the software community and create our own approaches that tackle our very specific challenges when it comes to creating value. Because we create value through the delivery of software. And software needs to be treated as its own industry with its own specific dynamics like for example, Conway's Law and these aspects we just talked about. Simon, it's been a pleasure. I mean lots of insights. Also some forward looking ideas that people can take and develop. Everyone out there do Follow Simon on LinkedIn if you want to check out the survey. It's also linked in the show notes with the report that Simon wrote and do send questions because I'm sure Simon would be delighted to continue the conversation on LinkedIn or even via email. So Simon, it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much for your generosity with your time and your knowledge.
- [44:20]
Simon Powers
Thank you for inviting me. It's been an absolute pleasure. It's been really great to speak with somebody who gets it, who has this incredible podcast that you've invited me on. So thank you. Thank you very much.
- [44:34]
Pasco Duarte
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