2022 forecast, the raise of Organizational Agility?

AO model

At the start of the week, I called on the agile French-speaking community to develop their predictions for 2022. Samuel Retière was the first to take up the challenge brilliantly. Now it’s my turn to make my hands dirty.

What is the point of this forecast?

A forecast gives a trend, a probability. Every once in a while, you’re lucky that this one is right.
This forecast is a way to take a unique look back at 2021, identify what is ending its lifecycle, highlight emerging activities, and spot opportunities to explore.
This forecast is none other than my 2022 roadmap.

Each context is different, and my forecast matches the context in which I operate.

At the end of 2020, I was recruited by Cognizant Digital Solutions, a small service company of nearly 300,000 people. 50% of my time is spent helping multinationals in their agile or DevOps transformation. The other 50% are devoted to helping my colleagues in the company, i.e., 2000 scrum masters and around 200 agile coaches.

Those in their decline

1. Scrum Alliance certifications and training : for whom?

Recruitment is an integral part of my coach or senior manager activity. Out of about 50 recruitments last year, one person had Scrum Alliance certification, and none had received training. The most popular training courses are those of scrum.org and SAFe.

The few people with training and certification have been agile coaches and managers from one of our large clients who have completed the Certified Agile Leader (CAL1). Aside from my colleague, my client’s managers did not take in the lessons and continue to behave as patronizing line managers.

The Scrum Alliance is very close to my heart, but I have to appeal to my listening conscience to note that the SA is coming into its sentence of decline, and I think the legal action against Jeff Sutherland was not over great help.

2. Extreme Programing: almost a myth

Extreme Programming remains an excellent approach, but it remains legendary. In 12 years and 200 projects, I have only seen one team practicing XP well. I wonder if this is because most development is done offshore, or is it the result of poor adoption of agility? Both, I believe.

3. SAFe: morbid obesity

SAFe is entering its decline phase. SAFe, like PMI, Prince 2, or Hermes before, is a hat methodology. The teams are doing the scrum, and the RTE (the agile coach at SAFe) makes sure that it fits the desired process. See no hatred from me; almost all of my clients come looking for SAFe.
The big banks or insurance companies that adopted SAFe a few years ago review this methodology. McKinsey, BCG, and other Gartner have added elements of Spotify to SAFe and OKRs to make agile @ scale. This new approach is a little more coherent, but it also avoids the fundamental problem of deconstructing functional silos (unbundling) and simple organizational design.

4.Offshore: challenged by just-in-time breakown

The COVID period has created significant uncertainties reinforced by the distance. Outsourcing a large part of its activity in countries with uncertain health issues increases operational risk. Cognizant is a large company offering offshore services to our global customers. The business model is evolving to strengthen the nearshore to reduce risks, increase responsiveness while controlling costs.

5. Human Resources: what HR?

Human resources will disappear to be outsourced, and people management activities will be transferred to the former heads of the business lines, which will become obsolete after the dissolution of functional silos (unbundling).
HR activities are purely process and regulation-based. The human-centered activities have moved into the team area helps coaching. The organizational world is moving faster than HR’s resistance to change, making it obsolete or just poorly distracting.

Emergent

The agile @ scale will grow in 2022 for large companies, as explained above.

To my knowledge, organizational Agility is a theme that emerged three years ago, and it appeared that companies have decided to invest in this concept. Scott Ambler is interested in the subject through Disciplined Agile / PMI or the Business Agility Institute with its partnership with the organizational design forum (ODF).

Three years ago, together with Mike Beedle and others, we developed the concept of Enterprise Scrum. Meanwhile, Scott Ambler took an exciting approach to consider three levels of Agility: People Agility, Team Agility, and Organization Agility.

For those members of the International Coaching Federation (ICF), you will find that the organization and individuals have their schedules. Recently, a Team Coaching program has been added to the ICF curriculum.

DevOps organizations.

DevOps is not about competing with agile, and agile has nothing to do with Lean. From an organizational point of view, DevOps will challenge your Agility:

• End-to-end dedicated teams
• Teams made up of developers / integrators / testers / sysadmin or full-stack.
• DevOps has nothing to do with the cloud or AzureDevOps,
• and it’s about continuous integration, Continuous Deployment, and Automated Orchestration to make it short, and sorry for the purists.

If your organization is doing software development and you are not doing DevOps, you will lose the battle. Setting up a DevOps organization takes time unless you start from scratch.

Behavioral Agility.

The work of Snowden on Cynefin, of Hoverstadt on Viable Systems, and my research on the dynamics of complex systems, are beginning to be applied for the establishment of agile organizations and mainly on digital organizations aligned with the principles of industry 4.0.

Home Office will become the norm. The big challenge of the home office is related to systems/team dynamics: even if you are virtually a member of a team, you are working alone. From a behavioral perspective, it means that the challenge will be more significant to strengthen the sense of belonging to a common purpose. “It is what it is” will say some of my system thinking colleagues, but it will be a considerable challenge to motivate, support, and retain the best people in these shaking times.

We learned from 2020 and 2021 that productivity increased at the home office. 2020 was quite exhausting for most of the workers until they integrated this new operating model, like managing their time. We are moving of the way where every worker is in a ROWE (result only working entity), forcing old structures to move into an organizational-based entity, as I explained in my book The New Normal. The home Office work will force enterprises to move into an agile organizational model.

Opportunities to explore.

- Agile and DevOps organizations as indicated above.

• Nearshore service centers are made up of autonomous agile / DevOps teams.
• Swarming for initiatives. Like explained in my book Swarming X4, it is a time-bound initiative to generate options for decision-making.
• Evolution of agile coaching: team coaching, organizational coaching, technical coaching, strategic coaching. Coaching everywhere means that the traditional supervisor and controller delegated to management is transformed into a supportive role: serving leadership, shared leadership, and constructively irritating.
• The development of creative activities to facilitate decision-making.
• Increase the usage of external agile coaches. Even if most of the reports recommend hiring internal agile coaches, the outcomes coming from such decisions delivered poor adoptions mainly due to a lack of empowerment to change.

Here is an outline of my predictions for 2022. As you can note, I have not dwelled on the methods, tools, and technology.

Test engines, IoT and AI test automation will be recurring themes for the most advanced companies.

Zürich, January the 8th 2022.