I played golf this past weekend with a guy I’d never played with before. It had been a while since I’d played, but I was fairly confident I’d be competitive (it’s like riding a bike, right!?) Well, I played okay, but this guy beat the ever loving snot out of me. And he only carried six clubs. SIX! It’s a round I won’t soon forget, and he taught me a valuable lesson.
In case you're not familiar, golf allows a player to carry 14 clubs, each used for a slightly different purpose or situation. Again, this guy only showed up with six. I have no doubt he has a full set of clubs but he only brought the ones he thought he needed for this golf course, and skillfully chose which one to use in each situation. The big “a-ha” moment for me was that having a bunch of tools isn’t nearly as important as understanding when and how to use them. As an Agile coach, I sometimes bring my whole “bag of clubs” when all the client really needed was a (metaphorical) putter. That is, just a small tool/technique that can advance them toward their goal.
Hard Yards recently encountered a DoD client needing to find a way to adapt its limited manpower to be innovative in response to a dynamic environment, while still fulfilling its core mission. A familiar problem, yes. But we took a somewhat unconventional approach. No Scrum certification classes. No Agile 101. No Agile jargon. We simply borrowed tenets and practices from multiple agile approaches and got them started. By giving them just enough to get moving forward without bogging them down in frameworks and rules and lexicon, we were able to get a cross functional team up and running with a viable quarterly plan in less than two days. It opened their eyes to an entirely new approach to organizing their work.
If you’re an Agile nerd reading this you might be saying “no duh” (I am on a personal crusade to bring back the 80’s classic slang phrase “no duh”). But now put yourself in the shoes of the client. They had never practiced Scrum or SAFe or Kanban – but did they need all those things? While they may have heard of some of the terms, they certainly didn’t need a full “bag” of tools. A complete Agile transformation would have been wasteful for everyone involved. All they needed was a slightly different way to look at a problem they were already familiar with. The most powerful quote I heard was “I’ve been trying to get traction on [this initiative] for two years, and now I think we can get it done.” That person walked out energized and excited because we demonstrated ways to limit work in progress and visualize dependencies. Rather than over-burdening them with frameworks, we started small. Small changes can have big impacts.
Agility is the ability to move quickly and easily. We don’t always have to go full-on Agile to get the client there. Following a pattern of Agile transformation is no different than showing up with 14 clubs and approaching golf the same way on every course. A one-size-fits-all approach actually limits our ability to help clients. I believe our job as Agile Coaches is to understand how to use all of the tools, carefully evaluate each situation, and then bring to bear the ones needed to get the job done and nothing more. In this case, all the client needed was a little nudge.
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