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To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail

Sponsored by: Amdocs and Red Hat To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Is Agile is the ‘golden hammer’ for accelerating telco software development and developing agile, digital culture?

07 Jan 2020
To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail

Sponsored by: Amdocs and Red Hat:
In researching a new TM Forum report, Practical steps towards an agile digital culture, Barry Graham wonders whether Agile is the ‘golden hammer’ for accelerating software development within communications service providers’ (CSPs’) organizations.

The source of the saying in the title of this blog is, like most sayings, somewhat disputed. But I was surprised to learn that the concept is actually a respected one in behavioural science, where it has the rather more formal name of the ‘law of the instrument’, a form of cognitive bias.

Anybody who, like me, has worked for a large multinational corporation for any length of time will be familiar with how this law sometimes plays out. In one part of the business a team will be set up to look at a problem to solve or an opportunity to improve. They will come up with a new way of working or a new process and try it out with great results. Then a leader somewhere in the organization decides that the entire company needs this new process and instructs the team to “roll it out” worldwide. In another corner of the business, a slightly bewildered group, which already has an effective way of working that’s been fine-tuned over the years, suddenly finds its processes scrapped and replaced by the new one aiming to solve a problem that never existed.
I have no doubt that the Agile approach, or one of its specific frameworks like Scrum, has been imposed on a team inappropriately many times in recent years. I sometimes wonder if it is the ‘golden hammer’ for accelerating software development of our times.

Agile is not one size fits all


While I admittedly approached the research for our latest report, Practical steps towards an agile, digital culture, with this rather cynical view in the back of my mind, I was pleasantly surprised that every, single CSP representative I spoke to stated emphatically, and usually repeatedly, “You can’t just use the same model everywhere.” The passion with which they spoke made me think most had shared my experience of being on the end of a golden hammer at some point in their careers.

It seems that those who have worked in Agile, innovative cultures have learned that you need to adapt the solution to the problem at hand, and that many problems are not best solved by the classic text book approaches.

Examples given are a maintenance team, working through tickets lodged for problems or changes needed. A daily stand-up with the plan for the day is going to look a little different for them, as, unlike a team working on a two-week sprint, they have no idea what they will encounter during the day and what help they might need. A team working on a two-year rolling replacement of legacy infrastructure is going to see little benefit from breaking their work into fixed, two-week blocks.

Commonality is not without merits: If every group in a corporation works in completely different ways, then transferring staff between projects is more complex, arranging common training and skills development becomes harder, metrics may start to have different meanings and teams working collaboratively may struggle to communicate.

What is needed is a balance, and finding one is a lot harder than simply implementing a model. This highlights why culture is so much more than process and organisations.
Finding this balance puts a huge demand on the leaders. It needs humble, servant leaders who spend time getting feedback from team members to really understand the needs and challenges of the group and empowering them to find the best solutions.

The leader’s role is not to impose, but to find the best compromise between the needs of the organisation and the needs of team. They need a completely different relationship with their own bosses and their teams.

It was really very inspiring to talk to some great leaders who are clearly working diligently to juggle new ideas, hard-won experience and practical day-to-day reality. They even found time to talk to us and share what they have learned. Find out more by downloading the report at the link below. And please join me in a webinar to discuss the report’s findings on January 30.

Download the report


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