I was just going through my office the other day when I found these wonderful 3.5-inch floppy disks. I know most of you reading this probably have never held one of these—you probably know what they are, but have never actually seen one in person. This discovery got me thinking: how far have we come with technology?
I have an old Macintosh with a black and white screen in my office just for nostalgia—one of those we used to use in school. But here's what struck me: while computers have progressed incredibly through the years, how often has your organization evolved its values and principles around how they treat their people? I bet they haven't changed nearly as much.
Hi there. My name is Lance Dacy, otherwise known as Big Agile, and I'm here to help you learn different techniques to practice next-generation agility for business organizations.
The Problem: Outdated Business Processes
What I find often is that many business processes are holdovers from the late eighties and early nineties. I know that was a long time ago—still feels like yesterday to me—but most organizational policies aren't changing at the rate that our technology is.
This is where agile coaches and scrum masters need to step up as enterprise change agents. In fact, our job demands it. Today, I want to focus on two departments that have enormous influence over organizations: finance and human resources (or whatever your organization calls the people department).
These departments rightfully control major decisions about people and money. Finance and accounting track all transactions to ensure cash flow for paying employees, while HR manages the engine of business—accounting for people, growing people, onboarding, hiring, and recruiting. Both are critically important.
However, it's not uncommon for these parts of our organization to have heavy influence over how our technology teams produce products. And here's the challenge: they're often reluctant to change, just like our teams are, but their changes are often more costly. If you make an accounting change, you might have to roll books back five years—obviously not a valuable change in most cases.
When Agile Dies: The Misalignment Problem
I want to focus on how what HR departments track regarding individual performance can actually harm the team-level agility we're trying to achieve in agile or scrum frameworks.
Agile dies when the system pays for behavior that is opposite of what we want to achieve in agility. It's so fragile anyway—you just blow on it and it seems to go away.
This is why I believe we need to translate agile principles to HR, accounting, and finance departments. They have issues too in how we fund and budget projects or teams.
When you create metrics that people will be graded on, they're likely going to pay attention to those things. Those metrics need to align with agile values and principles. That's how we can move outside our technology or product development teams and influence human resources, accounting, and finance.
Transforming HR: Beyond Traditional Performance Reviews
Let's start with HR and how they conduct performance reviews. We recently wrote a blog post about going beyond just our product development teams as enterprise agile coaches, and I often get asked: "What's the best way to do performance reviews?"
I could give you the answer that we just shouldn't do them anymore. Many studies show they're archaic. Or if you're doing yearly performance reviews, that's probably part of the problem. At minimum, shorten the timeframe, but also don't anchor performance reviews in individual performance metrics.
When practicing agile, we typically form cross-functional teams, which means we might actually be slower as individuals, but we're delivering sooner to the customer—which is what we're optimizing for. Many organizations sub-optimize just for people and lose sight of the customer. Leadership is often blind to this as well.
The Balanced Scorecard Solution
What we want to practice is what's known as a balanced scorecard for performance reviews. This way, we can start accounting for the behaviors we want to see as a team and celebrate those in performance reviews.
I remember sitting down with HR just trying to get a title change from "Project Manager" to "Scrum Master" so we could attract better talent. Scrum Masters look at job postings for "Project Manager" and think, "They haven't figured it out yet." It took me two years to make that change, but this balanced scorecard approach is one I'd like to work with HR to implement.
Let me show you what a balanced scorecard looks like with four key categories:
1. Individual Growth
- Skill development: What skills are you looking to develop? Are you getting certifications to prove continual learning?
- Peer feedback scores: Conducting 360-degree reviews within your team and stakeholder group
2. Team Level Goals
Instead of measuring individual velocity, focus on:
- Sprint predictability: How often is the work we pull into our sprint actually delivered? Our goal is predictability, though the nature of the work doesn't always allow for 100%
- Cross-functional collaboration and knowledge sharing: Am I helping teach other team members my skills so we have fewer dependencies and bottlenecks?
3. Budget and Finance Goals
While individual team members often can't directly affect budgets, they can:
- Be cognizant of new technology purchases and tools they use
- Practice budget adherence while having the freedom to choose their tools (we want agile teams to self-organize)
4. Stakeholder Outcomes
- Stakeholder surveys: How is our team performing from the stakeholder perspective?
- Quality metrics: Tracking defects and other indicators that impact end users
This balanced scorecard approach helps team members understand that when they get assessed in performance reviews, these are the areas we'll evaluate—not just individual output.
Transforming Finance: From Project Funding to Team Funding
Finance departments typically don't like variability. They're trying to forecast cash flow and stabilize the business, which is rightful. Agile isn't a natural fit for finance people, but they often have significant influence over how we fund projects.
The traditional approach: "Hey, for the whole year, I need to know what projects you're delivering and their ROI." That's incredibly difficult to predict for next week, let alone the whole year.
The Solution: Fund Teams, Not Projects
Instead of funding individual projects, I encourage finance departments to learn about our agile values and principles and fund development teams instead.
Here's how I explain it to finance: "Let's get together and I'll show you how we've organized and optimized our teams through organizational design."
We organize around product groups:
- E-commerce product group
- Point of sale product group
- Warehouse distribution product group
- Finance and accounting product group
Each product group has its own product backlog, just like in a scrum team. For e-commerce, we ask: "How much budget do we give to development?" This encompasses everything we need.
If e-commerce has enough work for three teams, and each scrum team has 8-10 people, we can calculate all the salaries and say, "E-commerce needs this budget for the year." Then we fund the teams and budget projects based on product owners working with stakeholders.
Finance and accounting can be part of that stakeholder group and find techniques for CapEx and OpEx strategies. The key is listening to finance people—what do they need? Build that into the process.
Funding teams over projects and giving them ways to track value delivery across different product groups often answers their questions better than having them dictate how we must operate.
Acting as an Enterprise Change Agent
The scrum master or agile coach needs to act as an enterprise change agent. You're not just working within your team—you definitely want to get them fully functional and productive, but you want to work on the organization, not in it.
HR, finance, and other leaders are often where we'll spend a good deal of our time, along with stakeholders. This broader influence is essential for creating true organizational agility.
Remember, technology has evolved from floppy disks to cloud computing, but our organizational practices often remain stuck in the past. As enterprise change agents, we have both the opportunity and responsibility to bridge that gap.
Ready to take your agile coaching skills to the enterprise level? Big Agile offers comprehensive training programs designed to help you become an effective organizational change agent. Explore our certified courses in Scrum Product Owner, Scrum Master, Working on a Scrum Team, and Accurate Agile Planning. Join us to dive deeper into these concepts and learn practical techniques for achieving true organizational agility.