How to Improve When You Can't Adopt New Technologies Easily

 

I was recently part of a business agility webinar for PMI's MENA (Middle East and North Africa) chapters.  At the very end of the webinar we were asked a question that was along the lines of "How can you apply DA when you're unable to adopt new technologies?" which I answered quickly as we were out of time.  My answer was a bit harsh at the time, which I share below, and in hindsight I wish I'd had time to answer more thoroughly.  Hence this blog posting which presents a more thorough answer.

First, improvement doesn't always require new technology. Many of the techniques referenced by the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit are technology independent. For example, consider the Coordinate Activities process goal diagram of Figure 1. Many of the techniques are manual in nature, such as Agile Modeling sessions (OK, you require the "technologies" of whiteboards, markers, and sticky notes), architecture owner teams (a cross-team group of people), and release windows (scheduled times when it's possible to release/deploy something to your customers). On the other hand, some improvements may require new technologies. For example, the strategy of adopt collaborative tools to coordinate between locations explicitly requires the adoption of agile management tools such as Atlassian's Jira or Zoho's Sprints. The point is that your organization's potential inability to adopt new technologies doesn't completely prevent you from making improvements to your way of working (WoW). As always, it depends.

Figure 1. The Coordinate Activities process goal.

Second, it's not that you can't adopt new strategies, it's that organizationally you choose not to. Stop looking for excuses to not improve, to not do what needs to be done for your organization to survive in the new competitive landscape that you face. Really. You need to stop making excuses. Your competitors are finding ways to adopt new technologies and so can you. You need to start making some hard choices now. My recommendation is that choose to succeed, and then choose to do the hard work required to do so.

Third, if you can't respond and improve quickly in the age of COVID-19 you're not likely to survive. This was pretty much my answer in the webinar. If there are groups in your organization preventing you from making the improvements that you need to compete and better serve your customers then you need to remove those blockers now.  This may mean that you educate those people as to why you need to improve, help them find budget to support the changes, or even ask them to get out of your way. Yes, that final strategy may require leadership within your organization to rethink whether those people should still be employed by your organization - even if that includes some of them.

Fourth, helping your organization improve sounds like a great opportunity for your project management office (PMO).  Earlier in the webinar PMI's Srini Srinivasan had addressed the issue of what role PMOs have in an agile organization.  He understandably indicated that PMOs must offer real value and be seen doing so. If your organization is struggling to make the changes it needs to improve, that sounds like a pretty good opportunity for a PMO to add tangible value.

I can't tell you exactly what the "new normal," or perhaps more accurately the "new abnormal," will be in the COVID-19 and post COVID-19 environments. But I know that it will be much more competitive than what you've been used to up until now.  I also know that it will require you to be able to better sense and respond to the changes in your environment. The Disciplined Agile (DA) tool kit can help you to do exactly this.