We suggest our clients focus on:
- Systems thinking
- Quarterly business planning or shorter
- Small business chunks so you can release quickly
- Creating the right environment for teams to work in
- Acceptance Test-Driven Development
- A flow-based mindset
In over a decade of doing Agile at scale, we’ve found the most important concept to be that of the smallest realizable chunk of business value (hashtag14’s topic). But why small? Consider this:
- Working on too many things creates gaps in workflow & feedback which creates additional work
- Often reducing batch size is all it takes to bring a system back into control – Eli Goldratt
- If you only quantify one thing, quantify the Cost of Delay. Don Reinertsen (smaller things take less time to build)
- There is more value created with overall alignment than with local excellence. DR.
- Smaller pieces take fewer people to build & makes it easier to align around. The more alignment you have, the more autonomy you can grant (Stephen Bungay, Art of Action)
- There’s nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all. -Peter Drucker. Big items almost certainly have more in them that isn’t necessary than small items