Agile Delivery Challenges – Circulation Is The Key

All life requires circulation. You can't sit still. Here's why that matters and how it affects us going forward. That's this week on the Badass Agile podcast. Greetings, team. Welcome to the Badass Agile podcast. I'm your host, Chris Williams. I got something that I hope will have impact on you and freshen up your practice and invigorate your practice for the year ahead.

Look. You can't sit still. If your organs don't receive blood, you're goner. When water isn't moving, bacteria gathers on the surface. When you don't move, as a practitioner, your byways to opportunity are going to clog up. Let me tell you what I mean. But first, let's take a moment to remember why we're here, to create an elite tribe of leaders who truly serve their clients and community by doing what matters and what works, relentlessly chasing value and excellence like a badass.

There's so many resources out there about what you need to do to be agile, but we focus on who you need to become in order to lead teams. So let's hammer down those fundamentals to create a truly unique and powerful force in this industry. If you love this episode, share it with your friends.

To talk about yesterday's Agile today is to immediately put yourself behind. Business changes every day, every week. You have to meet new people who need new things. You have to have new conversations about doing things in new ways. This means, put more simply, you have to circulate. We have to evolve the same way we tell our customers to evolve. Doesn't that make sense? Constant change, constant improvement, constant evaluation.

Remember that? It's built into what we preach, but maybe not so much in what we do. And I'm finding this happening a lot. In our practice, in our community, the simplicity of the 12 agile principles are easy to understand. They're easy to share. They're easy to preach, but they're not so easy to do. Think about it. Welcoming change, do we do that well? I would say

no based on the continuous presence of stuff that you see in the literature, the books, the videos, the social media that says we should go deeper into process. And especially concerning is all the politicking about how agile is just fine. It's not going anywhere. And that anyone who says it's in jeopardy is just fear mongering. I'll talk about that more in a future episode, but let's move on. Deliver early and frequently. Do

we do that? Do we not see more and more teams going to 1 month sprints or 3 month sprints sometimes? Are we really being courageous in helping our teams deliver stuff early, valuable stuff early and frequently? Are we keeping things simple? Are we valuing face to face communication? Are we driving deeper, thicker wedges between ourselves and, let's say, the product team or ourselves and the executive, the people who we're supposed to be serving?

If we don't live by those principles, if we don't evolve those principles, then how do you expect to compete and survive? We love to tell people the stories of Kodak or Blockbuster, the businesses that stood still, that denied the revolution or the rebellion by sitting there certain with their arms folded, rejecting the oncoming change. But we, as practitioners, don't seem to wanna know how to evolve better ourselves, how to be the Netflix or the digital camera.

The secret to everything is to circulate. Now, look, you don't have to believe me, but if you're struggling to find or keep your contracts or your job, if it feels like the industry is changing shape all around you and you're worried about what tomorrow holds, the secret is not to hang on to what you've got. Don't stand still and let blood pool up. You gotta move. You gotta circulate. So what does that mean? How do you do that?

I remember saying a while back in one of my videos, I think, that you've gotta become more intrepreneurial and entrepreneurial, And everyone's like, boo. We don't wanna hear that. What we wanna hear is that if I just bring my scrum guide and maybe my Lego to work, everything is gonna be fine. Well, look. If you want things to be fine, you yourselves have to

evolve and innovate. And the prize of a bright future in your industry or within your organization depends on you being able to do the following. Here are some examples. These are not from the back of my head. These are examples that are working for me

now. You don't have to do scrum or kanban or any other process or framework to be agile in your organization. And most importantly, you don't have to live in the software feature room anywhere in an organization where you can, number 1, help people prioritize better. Number 2, help them make more evidence based decisions. Number 3, help them reduce the cost of trying something new. By doing what? By simplifying, by MVPing, by prioritizing, etcetera, etcetera.

Number 4, help them get comfortable with failure. Number 5, help them reduce old, slow, and inefficient ways of planning and documenting stuff. Number 6, help them make things simpler. Number 7, help them learn better, especially learning through their own experiences. Number 8, help them to prefer action over anything else. And number 9, help them deliver value sooner and more frequently. We've heard this a 1000000 times. This should make perfect sense.

But what I'm saying is, there is questionable value in the way we've been implementing scrum, agile in organizations around the world, especially the biggest organizations. The reason why we're feeling what we're feeling now is because we're failing to circulate. We're failing to move blood through the system. So what does that mean when I say circulate? Go meet people who have problems.

People outside of tech, people outside of software projects because those nine things that I just ran through with you, these things are agile. Do one of them and you will help a team or a group get better. Any one of these would be sufficient to add value somewhere in the organization. Can you deliver a better training experience? Can you shorten the time to hire a new candidate? Can you create new policies more easily? Can you find new ways of reaching your customers?

Can you simplify or lower the cost of social media marketing? Is there a warehouse process to which any one of the nine principles I just ran through would apply and make things somehow better If you do these things in small pockets where the need is greatest and worry about the scaling later or never, then you'll be providing and creating real, genuine value for your customers.

But if we fail to circulate, if we fail to move on from the old way of doing things, if we stand still intellectually and physically, we're gonna struggle for air, and this is important because we're facing a crisis of faith with our clients, with the world at large. I still love agility as much as I ever have, but as we continue to improve it in the technical domain, we owe it to ourselves at the same time to be reaching out to other parts of

the organization. Every organism must grow, and you'll only grow if the blood is moving. Get out there and have those conversations. Advertise the nature of what you do as not being software development process experts, but rather as experts in delivering value to the marketplace in simpler, better ways. Thank you for listening, my friends. You can find me as always at badassagile.com, and you can check out my products and services atlearning.fusechamber.com.

Thank you again for listening. I look forward to seeing you next time, and until then, stay badass.