Do you want to create greater agility in your organisation?

Many organisations have a delivery pipeline that resembles a very polished oldsmobile - it has been maintained and restored like the day it was made. But it is no longer fit for purpose. The organisation has maintained classic Project/Program Management practices that are inflexible and cannot adapt to rapidly changing priorities.

These steps create immediate improvements in your organisation’s agility and adaptability. Apply these skills to get greater performance outcomes from your software teams.

Here are some enablers for doing that -

➤ Discover a project with the aim to deliver it in increments, and make no promises that all increments will be delivered in a sequence. Some might get delayed until later. Some might never get delivered at all. Create increasingly smaller increments. Set the expectation that they won't all be delivered. Create adaptable Project/Program Management practices.

➤ Deliver User Stories that are increasingly smaller. A closed-out User Story is something that can go into production without any further work. That means the team can stop working on that deliverable and focus on other, more important deliverables, even from other projects and work streams. Develop DevOps Knowledge to enable smaller work to be delivered continuously.

➤ Find the longest pole in the tent and make that your yard stick - can it be done faster? Can it be outsourced? Can it be done differently using an alternative solution? Create a rule about limiting long poles. (Longest pole - that which can't be broken down).

➤ Look for the critical path items in a deliverable, and focus all attention on those. Get those done soonest. Get those done with greatest risk management and attentiveness. Make everything else able to be cancelled or delayed or de-prioritised. If you get nothing else done, get the critical path items done.

➤ Challenge your team - why is this piece of work so long? In what ways can we deliver it 10 times sooner? Think outside the box. "If you had a genie who could make the impossible happen, how would you ask it to solve this problem?" then "What's stopping us from doing that?"

➤ If something just can't be done sooner, then question it's necessity - Why are we doing it? Explain the cost, and do cost comparison - "Doing this piece of work means we're not doing this other thing that is far more valuable." All scope is negotiable. Apply Stakeholder Management to help them get better outcomes.

➤ Apply 80/20 rule to scope; what 20% of this scope gives us 80% of the result? Use advanced Agile Methodologies Knowledge to breakdown work.