AgileConstellation

TURNING COMPLEXITY INTO VALUE

 

Business Agility is a key objective for many organizations, regardless of their industry and markets, and we can say the same for Antifragility. To achieve such objectives, the development of an Agile mindset, along with an adequate set of contextualized practices, is surely the best course of action that an organization should consider and experiment with.

It is important to avoid the trap of considering Agile useful only for software development. Despite the common belief, the roots of Agile are in non-software companies, as highlighted in 1986 Harvard paper "The New New Product Development Game” by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka.

In relation to these premises, AgileConstellation was born, an open-agora to collect the experiences of declination of Agile and Lean in contexts characterized by products and solutions that impact multiple disciplines and specific engineering domains.

The goal is to overcome typical problems of parallel development that are integrated only at the end of development, so called Big Bang Integration. This type of integration generates several critical problems:

  • development efficiency is heavily penalized, as teams do not continually communicate between them, do not share know-how, nor strength or weakness elements.
  • problems emerge only late in the development cycle, where fixing has high costs, especially for hardware components.
  • the resulting solution is, often, a low-quality compromise, driven by time constraints suffering from workarounds where components do not integrate perfectly.

The actula Agile Constellation domains are just a few influenced by Business Agility today. Business Agility impacts more than processes or frameworks, it changes the concept of flexibility and enhances organizational survival abilities.It is crucial to emphasize that there is no single path towards Business Agility: it is a journey and the first step is the most difficult to take.

AdaptiveDF

In the context of Haikai Management, Agile and Lean are not simple "methodologies" to be applied to the machine, but constitute the very DNA of daily operations. Today, the academic distinction between the two worlds has blurred in favor of a unified approach oriented towards Value Flow.

Agile provides the ability to react: it is the organization's immune system that allows it to detect changes in the market or requirements and adapt quickly without trauma. It is not just a matter of having "stand-up meetings", but of embracing empiricism (transparency, inspection, adaptation) as the only antidote to complexity. If the plan is speculation (as seen in AdaptivePM), Agile is the tool that validates or refutes that speculation through frequent releases of working software.

haikai agile infographic

Lean, on the other hand, provides the discipline of efficiency. Inspired by the Toyota Production System, Lean thinkingfocuses on the obsessive elimination of waste (Muda): everything that does not bring value to the end customer (waiting queues, task switching, unsolicited features, defects) must be removed. Lean shifts the focus from "being busy" to "being productive", introducing vital concepts such as Flow Efficiency and limiting Work In Progress (WIP).

haikai lean inphographic

At AdaptiveDF, these two worlds converge: we use Agile to make sure we build the right thing (Effectiveness) and Lean to build it as fast and cleanly as possible (Efficiency). 

This synthesis is what allows the Anchor Squad to maintain a sustainable pace indefinitely, avoiding burnout and ensuring that operational "naturalness" that is the heart of the Haikai philosophy.

Furthermore, when the organization grows beyond the size of a single Squad, the need for Scaling (Agile @Scale) emerges, an aspect that Haikai Management approaches this issue with extreme caution. 

The natural tendency for companies is to add coordination processes, management layers, and bureaucracy to manage the increase in teams. This approach, often referred to as "copy-pasting" heavy frameworks, ends up stifling the very agility that was being sought to scale.

The approach proposed in AdaptiveDF is, paradoxically, that of Descaling: before scaling processes, you have to scale complexity downwards. Instead of coordinating dependencies across ten teams, the goal is to break architectural and organizational dependencies so that those ten teams can work autonomously.

Scaling, from the Haikai perspective, is not a hierarchical structure of control, but a structure of support for the flow. 

Scaling frameworks are adopted not to impose rigidity, but to synchronize the company's heartbeat, with the goal being to have dozens of Squads operating as a fleet of autonomous but coordinated drones, not as a slow, heavy freight train. 

The choice of the scaling framework must therefore follow the golden rule of Haikai: maximum result with minimum of the necessary superstructure. If a process does not remove an impediment or facilitate the flow of value, it is itself a waste to be eliminated.

Regardless of its industry, a company can always try to be more flexible and better than it was yesterday
..:: Adaptability is essential to survival in a changing environment ::..
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