Business
Luke Nieuwenhuis, VP of ABO Incentives at Amway explains how Agile is a way of getting work done. We often overcomplicate it, but it's really about how we get things done as an organization. WHY IT MATTERSOur ability to move more quickly from one thing to another (markets, projects, strategies, etc.) is paramount to our ability to keep serving our customers. On the ground floor, our teams can be very flexible. They often know that what we're working on might not be the most important thing - the struggle is to get the rest of the organization to keep up. EXPLAINING AGILE IN SIMPLE TERMSDon't get caught up in the terminology (epics, features, sprints, etc.) The more we can talk about agile in terms of the intent behind the things we're doing, the better people will understand it. Our intent: focus first on the customer. What are their needs? How do we know those are their needs? How do we go about executing in solving those problems? How do we know our solution has solved it? These are the questions that agile is helping us answer.CHANGING MINDS IS HARDWe tried to explain that we don't need to force "everything" into one big launch, but until we showed people how it could work differently, it didn't stick. The proof was in showing them it's viable, and only after that did we really start to shift thinking.WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR THE CUSTOMERTheir feedback has a greater influence on how we make decisions and build solutions that help them run their business. The faster and more often we incorporate their feedback, the more trust we build with them. The caution is to not over do it. At some point, too much change makes it impossible to keep up with. If a tool you use to run your business changes every month, it's going to be difficult to be efficient and effective. THE CHALLENGESThe relationship between the process of how we work and the corresponding organizational structure. Today we are organized by functions and departments, and when we have work to do we spin up a project team and assign people to it. Getting to a place where we have stable teams is critical. Most teams should be persistent - and the work flows to the team. The transition from a project-based approach to a flow-based approach has a messy middle. It requires us to think differently about how teams work, and at the same time, identify ways we can do it in an organizational system that isn't completely designed for it yet. The risk is that we think "agile isn't working" because we haven't given the organization time to catch up with this new way of thinking - and at that point the tendency is to go back to what we've always done. HOW A LEADER CAN HELPWhen you get a new "project" or objective to accomplish, pause before you spin up a project team. Consider what stable teams exist (or should exist) in order to help you accomplish the work. Be more aware of how agile is seeking to accomplish the goals / work.