The Tale of Two Agile Journeys (Part 1)
It’s 10am on Thursday and there is rumbling in the hallways about the breaking news. The word is out about the departure of Bill Lazaro, the company’s CIO who has been with the company for the past 15 years. His successor, Dan Korey will be starting on Monday.
Things don’t look too good for the company which came under fire recently for a major system outage which cost the company millions of dollars. There was a rumor that Bill might be leaving and it was only a matter of time.
Chris Ludlow, the company’s CEO emailed all employees the previous night explaining the circumstances that led to Bill’s departure and the company’s new direction with the focus being technology and innovation. This means that Information Technology (IT) will be more of a strategic partner and enabler to the business rather than just supporting “keep the lights on” activities. Chris explained that while “keep the lights on” activities will continue, the focus will be on figuring out different ways to innovate.
Dan, the new CIO arrived Monday morning. He already has his work cut out for him with a busy schedule of meetings with the executive leadership and IT leadership. He also made time to meet with the IT department as a whole.
With the pressure mounting from the stakeholders and leadership, Dan has no time to waste. He needs to quickly figure out how IT organizes its work, what type of work do they currently do, how do they decide on taking on work, how do they prioritize the work and what could possibly be the cause of the constant bottlenecks as well as the system outages?
So many questions to ask however he knows that the previous CIO has been around for 15 years and has strong relationships across the company. This could be a hurdle for him especially with the environment being low on morale and psychological safety. Over the following two weeks, turnover becomes at an all time high at the IT department with no end in sight.
While Dan has made it clear that there will be changes in the future, he assured everyone that there is no need to worry about their jobs. The vibe everyone got however was different especially after Dan hired a new IT management team who has been with him at a previous company.
Dan has also made it clear that agile will be the new way of running IT projects and required everyone to get training on agile. Most teams started with scrum and the practices it came with it like the daily standup, sprints, and a demo at the end of the sprint. They also did a retrospective every once in a while.
On the surface, it looked like teams were operating the way Dan wanted them to but problems continued the way they were. Also, morale was not improving, teams were suffering burnout and turnover continued to rise. After two and half years of this conundrum, Dan ended up leaving the company.
The Biggest Lessons
While it is common for agile adoptions to start with a mandate from the leadership, it really lies in the continuous support and modeling the behavior from the leadership as well as a rigorous inspection and adaptation based on the reality on the ground. Of course, there is no silver bullet or one size fits all approach but this is a journey of discovery and not a planned out approach to change.
Dan started by asking the right questions (questions such as what type of work do we do, how do we decide on taking on work, how do we prioritize the work and what could possibly be the cause of the constant bottlenecks and system outages?). Unfortunately, he was quick to shift focus to the process of how things get done rather than the results he would like to see.
Another obvious sign was people following the process and reporting what he wanted to hear. This should have been a clue that it is essential to work on building trust and nurturing the psychological safety needed to allow people to bring up the challenges that prevents the change to work and provide the intended results.
Note: This is based on a true story however events and characters have been changed to protect the innocent.
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