Many of my middle-management and senior leadership clients want certainty about future work. That's one of the reasons they create huge backlogs and long roadmaps. Yet, even those backlogs and roadmaps don't offer certainty. One of these managers said, “I have so much uncertainty and ambiguity. I feel as if I can't make a good, final decision.”
When I asked why he had to make a final decision, he said, “Because I need to show strength and resolve, and point the direction. We have to know how we will make money next quarter and next year. We have to know now.”
As a businessperson, I, too, would love to predict my revenue a quarter to a year out. However, I don't do long consulting contracts—by design. In my experience, those are too risky. I do offer longer-term advisory services, starting at a quarter in duration and extending up to a year. But most of my business focuses on coaching, workshops, or consulting. That's because we reduce the goals to something short-term and achievable. Then, when the client is ready, we can do the next thing.
Does that sound like an agile team to you? I hope so.
However, managers don't create features as agile teams do. Instead, managers provide decisions as their deliverables. That's why a manager's decision time matters.
Instead of wanting a final decision, why not make it easy to change decisions? Agile teams don't assume they make a final product the first time out. They expect to change direction when they get feedback.
How Agile Teams Change Direction
When teams practice agility, they can change easily under these circumstances:
- Keep their WIP low, so they don't have to finish all kinds of other work before they can get to the new or changed work.
- Use technical excellence so they don't have unfinished code or tests, or worse, cruft. The code and tests are relatively easy to change.
- Work as a team, so they can learn and create together.
How can managers work as agile teams do, so they can change direction?
How Agile Managers Can Adapt Agile Team Ideas
Here are some ideas for how agile managers can change their direction, and not have to create final decisions too early:
- Keep their WIP low, too. The fewer decisions and interruptions pulling on a manager, the more likely they are to think through this decision and see what to learn.
- Technical excellence for a manager consists of these parts:
- A specific overarching goal for the work.
- A timely, good enough decision for now.
- And a commitment as to when to re-examine that decision.
- Use a management cohort to learn and create together.
That's when managers can use uncertainty to make more frequent decisions.
Make More Frequent Decisions Instead of Long and Large Plans
Here's the problem I see with big, long-term, and final management decisions: the decision is too large to have any certainty at all.
Remember I said I don't take long consulting engagements? Early in my consulting career, I learned that even a “guaranteed” consulting project was not a guarantee at all. Sure, the client might pay a kill fee (a portion of the unused project budget), but most of the time, the client said (on a Friday afternoon), “Thanks. The world has changed. Don't come back on Monday.”
While I always continued my marketing so my business would survive, I felt as if the clients cheated themselves. Because we thought we had more time, we didn't create smaller goals and achieve them. Our work was incomplete—according to their goals. And that's what people remember. Not that they changed the circumstances, but that we didn't finish.
That's exactly what happens when managers try to decide for a long time without revisiting their decisions. The world changes. If the world changes enough, the managers feel the need to lay people off, not just stop efforts. Those layoffs are a result of too-long and too-large management decisions.
Instead of long and large plans, managers can right-size their decisions.
Right-Size Management Decisions
Right-sizing a team's work is relatively easy. The team can split the large story into smaller increments of value, collaborate to finish it, or limit all the WIP so they focus on one item at a time. (See How to Right-Size Your Stories for Better Predictability for more information.)
That's exactly what managers can do.
- Instead of trying to make a large decision now (the how much problem), think about how little a decision you can make. (See Three (Not So Intuitive) Tips to Make Your Work Easier and Better.) When we reduce the size of the problem, we don't have to decide everything right now and maintain that decision.
- Collaborate with a cohort to make better decisions.
- Limit all the management WIP and make one decision at a time.
I've been practicing this my entire consulting career, so it feels easy to me now. But when I started? Oh, no. It was not easy.
But I practiced because the uncertainty was making me slightly nuts in my business.
Uncertainty is the Normal State
I don't have a crystal ball. All I can do is use the various feedback loops in my business. You can do the same.
When teams work on fewer items, their cycle time decreases. If they also work in collaboration, their cycle time decreases. Those are the blue feedback loops in the image above.
The faster the cycle time, the more opportunities the product leaders have to rethink the backlog and roadmaps, the red feedback loops. And, the more opportunities the portfolio team can rethink the project portfolio, the green feedback loops.
Planning can never create certainty. Uncertainty is actually a great thing—even though it's uncomfortable. When we have uncertainty, we have much more opportunity.
Managers can show strength and resolve when they say, “Here's the overarching goal for the next year. I plan to replan. At the product level, we'll create a rolling wave plan of three weeks. At the portfolio level, we create a rolling wave plan of six to eight weeks. That way, we can take advantage of opportunities much faster.”
This is management agility and how managers can make better decisions faster.
(See Practical Ways to Lead an Innovative Organization for more details about this.)