Your agile delivery model misses deployment dates, has defects released to production, and underwhelms customers. Ouch.

It’s nearly twenty-five years after the Agile Manifesto was signed. Yet, many organizations struggle with defining a consistent, agile delivery model with self-organizing standards.

Why your agile delivery model needs a tune-up

Here’s my number one reason your agile delivery model likely needs a refresh.

“Too many agile teams jump right into solving problems instead of investing time to determine what problems really need to be solved” – Isaac Sacolick.

Because agile teams are under too much pressure from stakeholders to deliver, they immediately jump into problem-solving mode. What often happens is whatever problem was raised first in the meeting is the one being worked on.

The approach is worse than just-in-time planning, but it has the same root cause – a lack of discipline and time to plan before act, shoot before aim, or code before collaboration. You get the gist.

Another reason this is happening is the tower of Babel around agile frameworks and DevOps technologies. “We need a release train tied to the value stream, optimize the team’s flow, and enhance the CI/CD pipeline.” Agilists interpret this jargon-filled statement in many different ways depending on their preferred framework.

Five steps to deliver a predictable, agile delivery model

Long-time readers of my newsletter, books, and agile planning guides know my secrets. They lie in simplicity.

1. Simplify the idea by crafting a one-page vision statement. You don’t need business plans, wireframes, or requirements are necessary to start working on an idea. Let’s make sure we understand the customer, value proposition, and targeted outcomes. If it’s a good idea, then let’s assemble the appropriate team to define the problem and opportunity.
2. Simplify solutioning by inspiring agile teams and bringing people together to brainstorm opportunities and develop solutions. Look for different scenarios and tradeoffs. Identify common problems. Weigh in on speed to market versus scalability. Identify technical debt boulders. Review security and compliance considerations.
3. Simplify planning by performing the steps top-down, left-to-right. StarCIO educates teams on agile continuous planning, where agile teams plan work every sprint, including epic, feature, and story breakdowns. We establish an efficient and accurate estimation process using story points that consider complexity, collaboration, and effort factors.
4. Simplify release management by looking beyond how teams automate deployment. Testing and observability are more important considerations for reliable releases. Faster and more frequent deployments aren’t always the best answers to optimize user experiences.
5. Simplify change management because the agile team’s release isn’t “done” at deployment time. Organizations need to bake in change management disciplines to their release management practice and to ease end-user adoption.

Lose the jargon. Drop the rigid frameworks. Define your agile way of working.

Contact me if you’d like to learn more about StarCIO’s agile transformation programs.