Straightforward lean agile systems thinking principles helping agile with sustainability

Running sustained iterative design-build-test introduces the risk of becoming blind-sighted from the longer term perspective, in terms of how individual features or groups of features are expected to develop over time. 

Holism sooner or later becomes elusive as smaller more frequent incremental releases can lead to release silos disconnected from the whole. 

End-to-end value chains can become fragmented and the benefits promised by agile may soon be overshadowed by other challenges.  

We love agile but sometimes find it difficult to see into the future

Just like every paradigm agile needs some help, especially when continual and sustained agile delivery is the goal. In the LAST (lean, agile, systems thinking) method,  learning, design and anasynthesis provide a view that helps to understand sustainability.  

We continue to learn, but we no longer develop or build, instead we design, and we don't analyse and plan anymore we do anasynthesis. This combination remains viable in a virtuous loop, until other internal or external forces intervene.

LAST can augment DevOps and sustained agile delivery

Explore the LAST method on Kumu through the dimensions of why, what and how - simply drag the model and tap or click on the various elements to see how they interact and support each other. Here's a link as the embed may not work reliably from the Blogger app :/ https://kumu.io/James/the-last-method

Gems from the deep "kiss systemic analysis"

Some simple and straightforward questions that can help to diagnose deeper systemic problems

When it is difficult to find the root causes of issues ask these questions 

• Has the issue occurred in the past, how long ago, under what circumstances?
• What sort of issues are surfacing in your coworkers teams? 
• Have these issues occurred in the past either in your team or other teams? 
• How different are the teams where these issues occur/have occurred?

Use "surfacing" techniques to corroborate the analysis throughout the organisation, this involves asking the same questions to a selection of people at different levels, with different lengths of tenure. 

Quite often colleagues experience the same or similar issues throughout the organisation, when they do these issues are often just symptoms of deeper underlying systemic problems that are ingrained in the organisation's culture or enforced by its processes. 



Some organisations are limited by too much focus on operations, they tend to be governed by the system archetypes "fixes that fail" or "shifting the burden". 

Rather than take a longer-term more strategic approach they prefer quick fixes or waiting for the future or getting rid of the problem with outsourcing. These approaches are doomed to fail, find out why in Sea of Systems.

I explore these and other systemic techniques in my eBook Sea of Systems, download it at my blog https://systemsthinkingit.blogspot.com.au




About — "gems from the deep" takes a quick dive into the more detailed and involved concepts explored in the eBooks Sea of Systems and Transparent Delivery (forthcoming).

Gems from the deep "making sustainability work"

Learn to present a clearer and more certain picture of the future than sticking your wet thumb in the air

It can't last forever

No matter how good the service is and no matter how well the service appears to be meeting demand, sooner or later the laws of system dynamics will come into play and causal loop feedback will catch up with us. Quite simply put: 'it can't last forever'.

In the above services system model acceptable service quality is limited by capacity, ultimately having an adverse effect on provisioning the service, for instance, not being able to meet the agreed service level. This is typical of the system archetype limits-to-growth.

How to address it?

• Use system dynamics to map-out and model service provisioning

• Try to understand and map-out all the systemic influences involved

• Consider the dimension of time and see what influence it has on the model(s)

• Consider the voice of the customer and involve customers with the model(s)

• Statistics don't lie, obtain as much statistical data as possible

• Identify trends and patterns of behaviour

• Walk-through and live-out the various scenarios learned from the models 

• Pick one that works

Conclusion

You've heard the saying "there's no silver bullet"?  Well, try to get as close as you can, maybe there's no guarantee and maybe it's hard to imagine all the "unforeseeable" circumstances, but when you start to use models in this way you can certainly present a clearer and more certain picture of the future than sticking your wet thumb in the air. 

When I started looking at the world through models the penny dropped, the overwhelming feeling was "IT people must know about this". That was in 1994 and I've been banging on about it ever since.

The system archetypes are in control and it is very hard to do anything about it, but if we don't try, what does that make us? I talk about this in the conclusion of Sea of Systems "well at least I helped this one".

I explore this and other system archetypes in my eBook Sea of Systems, download it at my blog https://systemsthinkingit.blogspot.com.au