New collaboration models arise. we are talking about horizontal and lateral leadership, the delegation of responsibility and digital organizations. All these concepts are great and address the rights points to overcome some hurdles we have maybe seen in the past and today. But are we really there? I think it is worth thinking about this. But – unfortunately – this journey is not easy and not for free and fur sure not an easy task.
So, we often see that maybe we are just in the middle of the transformation and therefore in some cases responsibility is transferred to somebody, but who is that?
So, let’s have a closer look:
Did you ever experience one of the following situations?
Somebody has an idea for a new business service that would increase the revenue of your company by a three-digit Mio €€ number. And of course, some minor IT changes might be necessary for that. The company decides to set up a project to realise it. So you invite for a meeting to discuss the scope and the goal of this project and even to collect requirements or at least decide who is needed for that activity. But soon, the invitation is spread – seemingly – nearly to the whole company. You end up having to find a bigger room since the list of attendees grows and grows. And in the end, you are sitting in the biggest meeting room available with your teammates and a crowd of “stakeholders”. It turns out that
- the business functions and services needed are not clearly owned by one department,
- the different stakeholders have different expectations towards the outcome
- it is unclear who is able to judge the cost/benefit ratio of this function
Nevertheless, since your team was given the task to build and implement that function, you start to collect user stories, requirements, etc. The initially estimated approach, implementation costs, timeline, and a number of sprints have to be revised and increased (yes, we all know this should not happen in agile projects). This leads to a circle of rescoping, reprioritisation, recalculations and several attempts to get an approval, which takes weeks or even months. And at the end of the day, the IT is blamed by the business for being too complex, not efficient and too expensive.
Salvation through agility
So, the silver bullet was praised:
“If we simply switch to agile working modes, we could solve all problems and transform into a more efficient, fast and responsive organisation. This will help us a lot because we could simply develop the requirements over time and do not need to agree on all requirements upfront.”
But what you may have observed in some cases is that this is not true despite the sensible and commendable agile approach.
Failure: Yes, in agile projects, we have the role of a product owner. So, it seems we have plenty of ownership as well. However, in practice, most product owners have very little decision power.
Failure: Yes, one goal of the agile approach is to maximise the value of the work, i.e. by simply putting the most valuable items on the top of the backlog, to have visibility of the business value. Reality shows that agile team often develop their own view on what is valuable.
Failure: Yes, it is easy to determine business benefits and design a lean and efficient process because we have a clear budget and process ownership. However, when things get tough, the traditional organisation always overrides the agile Methodists.
In all of these cases, we see the requirement for a well-established and hopefully clear responsibility within and outside the projects. Structural problems of existing organisations will most often not vanish just by introducing new roles or putting hope on self-organisation capabilities.
… this is not new, but still valid…
This situation is certainly not new; classic projects also often fail because of unclear ownership of requirements, business goals, sponsorship. New is that in some cases “agile” is seen as the swiss army knife to solve that all. If we only introduce this new concept, everything will be fine.
Please keep in mind that the intention of this article is NOT to blame agile ways of working. It is a great idea and delivers awesome results. The focus point here is that the prerequisites for a successful implementation of agile working must not be neglected. And one of these (not the only one) is a certain maturity level of the company in regards to responsibilities.
So now? We have complained about the missing ownerships, but what can we do to avoid this?
Recommendations
Unfortunately or luckily (depending on your point of view), most recommendations are not new. You can find them in many common books, articles or best practice guidelines. Nevertheless, here are those that are quite important from our point of view:
- Think about who is the budget owner – is it a person or a department or somebody you have never met and talked to?
- Think about the role of the PO – in the situation described above, is he or she able to stand up and say “It is my responsibility to ensure the business goals. Therefore, we will ….” or does he or she act more like the administrator of the backlog?
- Think about the assignment and the relation to all involved business departments – do they really have the same goals and expectations? How will they judge the success of the project?
- Think about the change to current processes, functions, business models and IT solutions induced by your agile project. Will this project change the life of your stakeholders or even endanger their jobs?
- Think about your commitment and of the whole team in regards to the task and backlog. Are you really keen on doing it, is it still fun?
Summary
As already mentioned above, the silver bullet has still not been invented, and will maybe never exist. Therefore, what is left is that it is still serious work to make a project successful, and it depends on people and their attitude and engagement. There is no final answer on how to solve missing responsibilities, but it is certainly worth the trouble to take care of this issue.
Agile will not solve ownership problems that already exist, but it will make these transparent – hopefully!
Have fun and keep hacking.
