This past Friday was LAST Conference (Lean, Agile, Systems Thinking) in Brisbane, which is a grassroots mini-conference for people involved in digital product development. The theme this year was "Innovating with Humanity", and I was one of the speakers. There has been a lot of interest in my slides (which I will share as well), but I thought I would write a blog post as I'm not sure pictures of triceratops will fully convey my message on building momentum in agile transformations.

Background

I have been lucky enough to be a part of several large agile transformations, and one of the key themes in each of them is the concept of building momentum in the transformation. This can be an incredibly valuable thing in that it allows the efforts of a transformation team to be focussed where they can provide the most value while parts of the organisation that are already on the journey will continue to transform. Often, though, how exactly momentum can be built , what it really means, or how to know if you have it or not is not discussed. The purpose of this post is to show you my journey with momentum in agile transformations to date as well as where I want to take this next.

My first port of call in my momentum journey was to look up a definition. Webster tells us that momentum is the force that keeps an object moving and the impetus and driving force gained by the development of a process or course of events. I love this definition, especially the part around impetus and driving force, as it really speaks to our job as coaches to not be the people driving everything, but rather leaving behind a series of sustainable practices and mindset shifts. It still doesn't tell us how to obtain it, and I left it there, until I found myself down a YouTube rabbit hole one evening.

I maintain a work and personal YouTube feed, and my personal one contains videos around my passions outside of work - motorsport, surfing, music and science among other things. Enter a video on what would happen if the earth was impacted by a gain of sand travelling at 99% the speed of light.

The video really got me thinking about momentum again. After some further research, it turns out that the effects described in the video aren't exactly true. While they are theoretically possible, it's unlikely due to the Lorentz Factor (WARNING: theoretical physics). It did get me thinking about transformative events in our planet's history. One event that did have the effects described in the video was the Chicxulub Impactor, which was the large extinction event asteroid impact off the Gulf of Mexico sixty six million years ago. Chicxulub was 10km in diameter and traveling at 20km / second, or roughly 58 times the speed of sound. Considerably bigger and slower than our grain of sand, but it caused mega tsunamis and earthquakes that lasted for months after the impact. It single handedly wiped out three quarters of the species on earth (mainly the non-avian species, interestingly) and ushered out the Mesozoic Era and Cretaceous Period in one fell swoop. It did, however allow for new beginnings and life as we know it.

Around this time, I was also listening to a podcast with Brian Cox (of Large Hadron Collider fame) talking about the formation of our solar system. Brian spoke about all of the planets being impacted by foreign bodies of varying sizes which did everything from making them sphere-ish to depositing the water and minerals required for life on earth. This started me thinking about the organisations we work with as planets and the changes we bring as the impactors. For our organisations, we need to find the sweet spot of changes to bring in depending on how we want to shape our planet. Do we need a Chicxulub-style extinction event (please note that I am talking process here, not people)? Some small meteors? A handful of sand? As an agilist, I am usually biased towards small, frequent changes, but sometimes in transformations, you may need the big ones too.

A Formula

We still need a way to measure this, though. The video spoke about a formula for kinetic energy, 1/2 mass x velocity squared, but that’s a bit clunky. There is, however, a very simple formula for momentum where momentum is equal to mass times velocity.

p=mv

I started to use this as a way to think about the correlation between the size and frequency of changes and how this leads to momentum, alongside being aware of the human effects of transformation. Here are some examples of how I used this thought model.

Pandemic Madness

I was working through a large agile transformation with medium mass, medium velocity changes in a highly regulated environment with critical work, when suddenly, the pandemic emerged. The organisation couldn't have been less prepared for remote work. Teams were literally carrying desktop computers, monitors, mice and keyboards out the front door on their way home. The infrastructure behind Skype for Business (remember that?) couldn't support more than two people having video turned on, so we were reduced to conference calls. On top of this, there was the societal change, such as suddenly needing to worry about whether or not we could get toilet paper. From a change perspective, the pandemic was massive and seemingly high velocity. We stopped all other transformation changes to allow teams to work through the pandemic related ones. As time passed, though, the pandemic related changes, while still high mass, reduced in velocity. We then began introducing new, small process changes at a slowly increasing velocity. Our agility maturity remained stable throughout (as measured by maturity assessments), throughput increased and cycle time decreased.

New to Agility

Another agile transformation I was leading was having agile introduced for the first time. Teams had been giving it a go for month or two, but were introducing some anti-patterns along the way. The organisation and the work were structured along functional line management, rather than cross-functional teams, and there was a large appetite to transform quickly to prove the return on investment. We knew that we needed to create cross-functional teams, but this was quite a large change and the appetite was there for a high velocity. We decided to reduce the mass of the change through using a "Minimum Viable Team" approach where we formed one cross functional team as a proof of concept in how this could work in the organisation. We then introduced small mass, high velocity changes in how this team was working. We were able to scale to three teams within the first month and continued scaling to the entire department (~200 people) with an agile-friendly structure in the first year. All of the teams were also operating at a Shu maturity level in the first year.

A Metric

At this point, I was convinced the formula works in large agile transformations, but I was still using gut feel and didn't have a metric. What follows is where I want to take this idea next, and, in the spirit of open source knowledge, I want to share it with the community. The only thing I ask is to please provide me with feedback and how you've modified it, to in turn help me.

The way I see it, creating a metric should be simple. We know the formula for momentum, and all we need to do is quantify mass and velocity.

Mass

As agilists, we are already familiar with the Fibonacci sequence and frequently use it to estimate user stories. We could easily use this to relatively estimate process changes. When I talk about the mass of a change, I am thinking about things like impacts with a systems thinking lens, risk (regulatory, quality, etc.) as well as likely resistance. What else would make up the mass of your changes, specific to your context?

Velocity

We could also count the process changes over a period of time and use that for velocity. The time period we think about will be different depending on the level of the organisation you're using this at. If you're talking all of organisastion, or department, you could use a quarter, while at team level you could use a sprint.

Multiply the two together, and voila!, a metric. If you add the Momentum totals from each card (at a particular level - org or team), you will get your Momentum Metric for that period. We can also capture these values as well as the change itself on a card.

Action Time!

Similarly to when a team starts estimating using story points and finding their predicted sprint velocity, you won't know at first what the appropriate Momentum Metric is. The first place to start is a conversation about what is an appropriate amount of change to try over a period of time. The suggested steps to take are:

Have a conversation about it
- Decide what the target momentum metric is
- This can be done at org and team level
Measure your process changes
- Estimate the mass
- Count the number of process changes over a given period of time - this is your velocity
- Calculate momentum for each changes by multiplying mass x velocity
Calculate your Momentum Metric for the time period
- Add total momentum number of each change
Make them visible
- On a team / org wall - virtual or physical
- Take a systems thinking lens - what else is going on in the organisation that should be included in your changes?
Reflect and adjust
- If it’s too much, what happens and how do you know?
- If it’s too little, what happens and how do you know?

When we talk about Momentum Walls, here is an example of what it could look like at an organisation level:

At that level it is a great change management tool, but at the team level is where the real gold is. As a coach, leader, or other team member, you can walk the walls to get great visibility into what other teams are doing. Tools such as Agile Maturity Assessments are a great input into the changes that a team could be making. Walls at this level allow you to spot how much change is going on over time as well as if you can see a flow on effect from the organisation wall (BRP prep in this case).

One thing that this wall doesn't do, though, is to talk about what stage changes are at or whether they have been successful or not. To fix that, we could easily incorporate a PDCA cycle into our Momentum Wall:

But does it matter?

To sum up, yes, momentum does matter, and is one of the most important things to focus on in a transformation. To extract the full value, you have to quantify it and talk about it with data. My one ask is for anyone thinks this will be useful, please give it a go, and let me know how you went, so I can learn from you! I am currently implementing this with a new transformation, and I will post my progress and learnings here.

“There is something about the momentum of travel that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop. ”

— Bill Bryson

Does Momentum Matter? Ask the Dinosaurs.