Governance — the biggest hurdle for agile transformation?
Over the last decade we have been involved in agile transformations varying from the “small and beautiful” to those claiming to be the “world’s biggest agile adoption programme”. As coaches or advisors our role often comes up against the topics of Portfolio Management and Financial Management, mostly seen as absolute showstoppers for the adoption of agile practices, but also often where executives and ‘management’ are keen to start. In the beginning, we concluded that the two topics are too abstract, and a limited understanding caused the belief. However all too often neither Portfolio Management nor Financial Management actually proved to be in the way of the agile transformation.
Through much discussion, some tears (and some beers), the trend in what is blocking change (as well as the traditional “Culture” answer) is often that which ironically is meant to be there to help us deliver successfully… yes, it is that favourite/hated topic of everyone — Governance!
What is “Governance”?
Governance can be defined as arrangements made to regulate the decision-making processes and procedures from top to bottom.
Good governance arrangements are not only complete (covering many scenarios) and clear (allowing for the interpretation of scenarios that are not explicitly covered) but also allow for agility at all levels, often via a transparent encouragement of empowerment, decentralisation, and delegation.
What is “Delegation”?
Delegation is the assignment of authority to another person to carry out an activity with a view that that person is empowered to make decisions. In the context of agile adoption, the most common example is the Scrum Product Owner who works with the development team and is empowered to make decisions, prioritising their backlog, and being accountable for the value delivered by the team as a whole.
In many organisations project governance and the governance of project management were typically not well defined or inconsistently applied — quite the opposite is true for corporate governance.
A simple thought experiment can be used to test this — according to the corporate arrangements (think HR record) a programme director has authority to sign for expenditure of £1K. The programme director oversees a £10M programme — how far is he/she empowered to operate within the overall budget of the programme?
In practice, the degree of freedom to operate within the constraints of the budget are limited — the concept of gated funding is no contradiction, neither should the existence of a programme steering committee prevent the director from the decision-making.
The root cause is a lack of trust in the capabilities of the person and teams who are being empowered. The issue was not addressed within the governance arrangements for project and programme management and are now frequently preventing a successful adoption of agile principles and techniques.
What does good look like?
There is no single silver bullet for changing all organisation’s governance to support their quest for agility. Across successful organisations some common patterns come up however:
- The leadership must provide strategic objectives and meaningful targets, on both organisational and individual level.
- Governance and leadership focus on providing sponsorship and space for teams over micro-management of individual requirements.
- A clear intent-focussed vision in place for each team and area, coupled with a commitment to the value of bottom-up ownership from the teams themselves.
- A constant quest for the reduction of lead time and the batch size of individual projects and work items (moving from durations of months or years to days and weeks).
- Investment in tooling and mechanisms to ensure both delivery of work and outcomes are properly visualised, managed, and aligned.
Equally, no single agile framework, method or approach is always the right answer, and there is no ‘copy paste’ shortcuts. Expect to need to explore and experiment — after all, we are wanting to be agile, right?
