Fake agile is an unsuccessful way of being agile. It often creeps into organizations when teams adopt surface-level agility practices without embracing its core principles.
In this episode of the Scaling Tech podcast, we dive deep into what true agility really looks like with our guest, Johanna Rothman. Johanna is known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” a highly regarded agile management consultant and author of over 20 books on product management, product development, and personal development. She was also our past guest where we discussed transitioning from chaos to successful distributed agile teams (Episode 12).
This time, we’re diving into her recent book Project Lifecycles, in which she shares valuable insights on how agile teams should operate to reduce risks, release successful products, and improve overall team agility and effectiveness.
Johanna and Arin discuss many key topics for agile teams, including signs of fake agility, how resource efficiency undermines true agility, why flow efficiency is the better approach, strategies for delivering value to customers, and much more.
Tune into this episode to discover how to build true agility and create a high-performing team.
Listen to the full episode on Spotify
Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts
Complete interview with Johanna Rothman on YouTube
Watch the video:
Key Insights are below
About Guest:
Name: Johanna Rothman
What she does: She is an Author, Consultant, and Speaker with Expertise in Managing Product Development.
Company: Rothman Consulting Group
Where to find Johanna: LinkedIn | Website | Newsletter
Key Insights
⚡An agile team is self-sufficient and can deliver results efficiently. True agility means cross-functional collaboration and a focus on delivering real value to the customer. Here’s how Johanna describes it. “In general, an agile team is a group of cross-functional people who have all the skills and capabilities that they need to finish the project. So I would expect developers of some sort, testers, maybe UI, UX people; sometimes those are the same, sometimes those are different. I’m not religious about what we call them, but the ability of the team to say, ‘What does the user need to say? What problems does the user need to solve? And how do we organize our work?’ So the team organizes its work, and there might be a hand of a facilitator of some sort […], but the team is totally capable on its own, finishing work in a reasonably quick manner.”
⚡Resource efficiency vs flow efficiency. Understanding the difference between resource and flow efficiency for agile teams is crucial. Each has its own impact on the speed and quality of work.
Johanna explains how resource efficiency creates bottlenecks in the workflow, “There are two really important concepts: resource efficiency and flow efficiency. In resource efficiency, the first expert takes the work, does his or her part of it, and then hands it off to the next expert. That person does their work, they hand it off, et cetera, et cetera. Every single handoff is a possible delay. Now, maybe it’s not a delay in your team, but in almost every team I’ve seen where there are long cycle times when it takes a long time to finish the work. There’s a lot of experts doing their work, and then they hand it off to the next person. Now, the problem with that is you can go pretty far down that road before that first expert receives feedback, and the length of that feedback loop says, ‘Oh, I made a mistake.’”
⚡Team behavior drives team culture. When it comes to improving team performance, a common question arises: What comes first, changing culture or changing methodologies in a team?
Johanna offers a different perspective, focusing on behavior. She explains, “Not really the methodology and not really the culture but changing the behavior. When we say we really need to focus on our cycle time because our managers are breathing down our necks and our customers are not happy, the way to do that is to focus on cycle time. And the more a team focuses on cycle time, the more they will say, ‘Oh, our WIP is really high; we need to do something about that.’ Or ‘We have so much stuff from six months ago; do we really need to even think about that?’ And when was the last time we did a little retrospective in the learned?”
Episode Highlights
How to recognize fake agility?
Recognizing fake agility in a team can be tricky, but there are some signs. When agility is only being followed on the surface, teams often struggle to deliver value effectively. Johanna shares some telltale signs of fake agility.
“What I see in fake agility is there are components teams. So teams are across the architecture instead of through it. So there’s the UI team, maybe an API team, the top-level piece of the architecture, the middleware, the platform… There’s often a data warehouse over there somewhere. There’s product manager, then a product owner, then a business analyst, then a scrum master, then a coach. There’s all these people around the team because the team is not cohesive, and the team is not able to deliver a piece of value on a regular basis that the customer wants.”
The importance of flow efficiency over resource efficiency.
Focusing too much on resource efficiency can destroy agility by narrowing the perspective to individual tasks instead of the bigger picture. In contrast, flow efficiency is about seeing how work moves through the system. As Johanna explains,
“The later the feedback loop, the longer everything takes. So when we work in flow efficiency, we tend to work, I like to say, well, I think all the Kanban people say, we watch the work, not the people. In resource efficiency, we watch the people, not the work. Now, there are plenty of more traditional project managers who have said, ‘I watch the work and not the people.’ And I say, okay, that’s good. However, the more you focus on what the individual does, the less you see the whole. You’re seeing the sum of the parts. But how many times has the sum of the parts not equaled the whole in your experience? That’s the problem with resource efficiency.”
People are not resources; they are resourceful talent.
In the business world, it’s common to refer to people as ‘resources,’ but this mindset misses the true value individuals bring to a team. Arin and Johanna dive into this idea in their conversation.
Arin points out, “People aren’t cells in a spreadsheet. They’re teams. They’re talent. Those are the kind of terms I try to use instead of saying resources. So I’m curious: what do you think? Coach me out of this bias if needed.”
Johanna wholeheartedly agrees, adding, “No, no, I’m with you all the way. I had in every single one of the modern management books, practical ways to manage yourself, practical ways to lead and serve others, and practical ways to lead an innovative organization, especially that last one, book three, I rant about the idea of calling people resources. People are resourceful. They might be a limited resource if you need to ask someone off your team a question, but I don’t like that. I really like to think of people as people. I mean, why not call them humans? Why not call them people?”