Vision Matters

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" [asked Alice] "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat. "I don't much care where--" said Alice. "Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat. "

--Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

It's easy to become cynical of company’s vision or mission statements: they usually sound either a mouthful that no one can understand without a transcript or too “motherhood and apple pie” that no one can relate to. Yet, vision matters. If you don’t know where you want to be, how can you prioritize and make decisions along the way? And… by the way… along the way WHERE?

Take one of the most successful companies you know and try to guess what their vision is. You might not guess the right wording but I bet you’ll get close. The reason for that is simple: these companies got THERE by taking specific actions and making specific decisions that have aligned with the company’s vision and brought them closer to achieving it.

Having a vision is crucial – everyone in the organization has to know what the desired end result is and why we are going through this transformation. When a decision has to be made, an approach chosen or a conflict resolved, having vision will be a guiding force for you. Test your decisions binary, in a vacuum: will it bring you closer to achieving the goal or not? Then add the context.

The vision format that worked great for us was one we borrowed from Coca Cola:

Our vision is: [A high level statement goes here]. In order to achieve this vision we’ve set clear goals:
[Supporting goals go here.]
This format allows avoiding a mouthful by stating one short summarizing statement and “delegating” details to the goals. Next key point is for goals to keep good balance between being too concrete vs. being too general. At this stage do not plant Agile concepts in, remember – Agile is a means to an end, so concentrate on an end when composing a vision statement.
Next comes not less important part – planning for communication. While freshly created vision statement resonates well with all the participants in long brainstorming session, you should expect that coming out of that meeting your vision statement might not be as clear to the rest of the group. For each goal provide meaningful explanation in simpler terms and list everyday activities that will help you achieve this goal. These will not appear on the vision statement poster, but will be communicated by you to the rest of the group.

Many researchers in field of leadership have concluded that vision is one of the key components that a true leader must possess. While having a vision statement does not make you visionary in one day it does help motivating people around you, and in Agile transformation you’ll need it.

Hiring a coach

Agile coaching is a hot topic now – great opportunity for anyone who is in software or management consulting business to capitalize on on this new “trend”. How do you choose a coach that is right for you? To answer this question let’s focus on what we are trying to achieve. We need a coach to accompany our Agile transformation because we do not have enough expertise in-house – sounds like a good reason to hire a consultant. Our initial thought was to find a coach who has “done it” with companies of our size and with similar transformation context. We were focusing on challenges this coach had with other teams and whether he/she was successful to address these challenges, and how creative he/she was in addressing them. Here are some good questions to ask the candidate:

1. How would you address the limited shared resources situation, knowing that company cannot hire additional personnel? Specifically, how would you suggest dealing with 1 UX Designer serving simultaneously 3-4 teams? How about Product Owner serving 2-3 teams?
2. Pure SCRUM promotes approach of evolving architecture, while focusing on juiciest features. This is one area where we will not follow the guideline and would take RUP based approach, investing in architecture in the beginning. How would you approach this kind of projects, knowing this constraint?
3. Would you engage offshore team in pilot projects? If yes, would you try to co-locate or to mix teams (current model is mixed/extended teams)?

Like with hiring any senior resource it’s important to look for behavioral patterns through thought process exposed while answering the questions.
Another important aspect that we felt was necessary is coach background. It’s definitely an advantage when the coach is coming from development background experienced in both Waterfall and Agile environments. This is because there will be a higher chance to ”click” with engineers on fresh Agile teams.