AMIA#27 | The Utilisation Trap
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AMIA: #27
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The culture of ‘busyness’
In my experience, it stems from the utilisation trap. The process goes something like this:
We must produce more, faster. We must scale.
We need to hire more people.
We have too many dependencies. People are idle.
We must start more work to keep people busy or we are not utilising our resources in an optimal manner.
The more work we start, the less is getting done.
We need to use more offshore resources.
Meanwhile, a small, self-organised team can move mountains, without the need for looking busy.
Answering Some Scaling Comments
In the previous newsletter, I talked about the pitfalls of agile scaling.
Reading the comments. People generally seem to go from a scale of one team to a large scale of the whole of organisation.
There is a lot in the middle. We forget about HR incentives. How people are asked to justify people, budgets and how these people advance in their careers.
Budgeting overall is living in the past. We ask people to work agile, meaning having the ability to change with quick easy grace. Yet, we ask them to scramble for budgets for people, tools, resources and time from other teams on a yearly basis.
There are clashing incentives that put parts of organization on a win-loss path. For e.g. we may ask one to deliver software on a tight timeline. We may ask the other to ensure costs are cut by moving as many engineering sources to offshore as we can. Teams can't deliver with continuous turnover and agitation.
Most initiatives aren't co-designed in the organisation. Depressingly, these are dictates from the top, divided and sent down the chain of command through C-suits, G-suits to the middle managers to regurgitate something awful and whip the workers into action... for reporting back up the chain.
All the issues we have discussed in this post, are rooted in putting the cart before the horse.
By CEOs who promise the board 'Agile Transformation' because they think it allows 'double the productivity in half the time' 🤦♂️ and because competitors are going 'Agile'.
The Agile community, and we have huge problems in this community, can only as far as it can and I don't see a path forward.
The only way forward I see is beyond the agile community, in the business management to fundamentally change the structure of an organization. A top-down pivot towards business agility.
I’d encourage you to study the OpenSystemsTheory website. It’s still raw and I’m giving the authors feedback.
That’s all for today. Have a great week and I’ll see you next Sunday.
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