A Thoughtful Approach to Scaling Agile

Last week I had the opportunity to attend a webinar through HyperDrive Agile entitled “Can You Rephrase That Without Using the Word ‘Agile’?”. The webinar was presented by Alan Eustace and Ian Maple of Workday. Note that I have no association with Workday and am sharing my own personal thoughts on what they presented during the webinar.

I’ll admit that what originally attracted me to the webinar was the title. Whenever anyone asks me to help them “become agile” or “become more agile”, my first response is always to ask them why they want to do so, as agility is only a means to an end. The presenters’ formulation of that question as “Can you rephrase that without using the word ‘agile’?” is quite clever and, I suspect, effective at getting to ultimate outcome desired.

While that was a great start to their presentation, they went on to explain their holistic approach to scaling agility at Workday where they both lead the agility efforts. I highly encourage you to view the webinar on the HyperDrive website as there were many valuable insights one can glean from the webinar.

Before I give a quick summary of the components of their program that most resonated with me, I want to give a quick but necessary caveat when looking at another organization’s agility model. Please note that what works at Workday may or may not work for your organization, so please don’t attempt to apply their model (or anyone’s model) directly. (The most egregious example of this is the number of organizations who have tried to adopt the “Spotify model” despite pleas from Spotify itself that what works for Spotify might not work for others.). Instead, I suggest one looks for underlying principles that can be applied in the correct context at your organization.

The first item that stood out to me was how Workday has defined a common vernacular for talking about agility which includes defined outcome dimensions, team roles, team maturity, scale, timeframes, and a set of services which the agility team offers to support and cultivate the desired agility outcomes. This sets the stage for ensuring that focus is applied to the services and practices that will drive teams closer to specific agility outcomes.

This is leveraged heavily in their problem statement framework that they use to engage different groups at Workday who are looking to improve some aspect of their agility. The problem statement framework is a structure for specifying what problem is being faced and by who that not only drives down to the root causes of the problem but also incorporates the feelings and emotions of the person(s) who is trying to solve the problem.

My favorite part of the problem statement framework is that they have leveraged the concepts of both leading practice metrics and trailing outcome metrics. Most of us find identifying trailing outcome metrics fairly easy, but of course the problem is that they are trailing metrics so it takes a long time to see if we are headed in the right direction. By focusing on supporting agility practices that can drive the trailing outcome metrics, they logically lead to leading practice metrics that can serve as a proxy for the desired trailing outcome metric.

I also like how they thought about ensuring that support and momentum scales appropriately across the Workday organization. They have developed a support system based on identifying Agility Sponsors and Champions in each business unit. For a change in behavior and practices to take hold and persist, one needs local leaders who can provide the encouragement and tailwinds needed for true and lasting change.

The last thing I want to note is that they talked about their approach to educating people in the organization on agile practices. Workday decided to use the ICAgile certification framework as training paths for specific roles. They chose to use ICAgile specifically because ICAgile is framework agnostic and has a high standard of learning objectives behind their certifications. While I myself have two ICAgile certifications, the reason why I like their approach is that it doesn’t lock them into a specific agility framework. Having said that, each organization should decide whether they want to base their training program on a particular certification standard based on their own needs and their own views of certification, both in general and for specific certifications.

I definitely recommend you watch the webinar if you are interested in the thought process that goes into establishing an agility framework, especially at scale. I think it will be worth your time. I also want to thank Alan and Ian for taking the time to share their experience and approach with the broader agile community!