Introduction

Is your organisation under a silent attack from within? Is the IT team gradually changing operating processes in favour of how they believe the organisation should function? Is your organisation a stealth technology company with the IT team at its centre? Believe it or not, you could be facing an IT mutiny …..

IT Mutineers

When you stop and think about it, the mutineers within your IT team are interesting individuals. I doubt you will find many wooden legs or parrots perched on their shoulders but:

• They are typically well educated, usually to at least first degree level. They are hired because of their ability to think logically and solve problems
• Frequently, technology and technological innovation is their passion and is enjoyed as a hobby as well as a career choice, providing an opportunity to enhance and extend their skills and experience outside of their day-to-day role
• Their world is one of constant change. Technology is introduced and updated so frequently, especially by the public Cloud providers, that documentation is often out of date. New frameworks and open source technologies are released daily, and often these represent a shift in industry direction
• Security best practices are constantly evolving and adapting to a hostile, globally connected world
• New trends for delivery and operating processes emerge, as forward-thinking organisations publish information about their successes
• Tooling and software continually advances, with an endless stream of new SaaS providers entering and capturing the imagination of the market
• IT mutineers are directly plugged into all of the other departments in the organisation and hear all of the grumbles and gripes

Due to their problem-solving nature, IT mutineers are always thinking of ways to support their colleagues across the organisation by making improvements through technologies and process changes. They want to support, enhance, evolve, and improve their organisation; this seems far removed from potential pirates that want to take control of the ship……..

Why Start a Mutiny?

To be fair, this kind of mutiny isn’t really intentional, and the mutineers involved aren’t malicious. But, their actions can have devastating consequences.

If you are a natural problem solver, that sees opportunities to improve everywhere, and thinks of change as a norm, then you expect things to change for the better; if you don’t see this change, or don’t see it happening fast enough, you make it happen. This is where the mutiny begins, under the guise of Agile.

Historically, organisations have evolved through decisions made at the board and senior management levels. These decisions have taken time to ferment and to be contemplated and discussed, before they are trickled down through a management hierarchy that directly influences the behaviour of their employees. In the world of the IT pirate, this kind of evolution is extinct. We are on the verge of the 4th industrial revolution. IT mutineers see the global tech giants, with their modern operating models, architectures, and digital processes, empowering every individual so that anyone can have an impact and add value. Decisions are made quickly because competitive advantage is the only option to long-term existence. Mutineers can’t wait for decisions to ferment, or to trickle.

So, they adopt Agile, regardless of how the organisation currently operates. The mutiny begins

When an IT team adopts Agile methodologies, their interactions with almost every other department change:

• Their release cadence changes (e.g. to fortnightly sprint releases or feature-based Kanban) so users and operational support staff need to adjust their processes
• A frequent release cadence has an impact on governance, through architectural approvals and Change Advisory Boards
• An Agile IT team places demands on the wider organisation for ownership and subject matter expertise
• Project management, reporting, and forecasting must be updated to cater for incremental deliverables; often senior management feel left in the dark and demand time-consuming ad-hoc reports to be generated
• Legal contracts need to operate differently; contractor and third party contracts need to be based around statements of work, not well defined deliverables

These requirements and changes that are placed on the other departments carry a heavy burden. Departments don’t usually have excess staff, just waiting to support organisational or process changes. So, their workload increases. The complexity within their department increases as they are forced into operating a dual model – the existing processes and the inflicted Agile processes. Increased complexity leads to more conversations, more meetings, more processes, more documentation, more friction – which in turn leads to more time pressures. Suddenly, a seemingly innocuous choice by the IT team is creating challenges and pressure in every department.

Left unchecked, people will start to leave. The people that leave first are typical the organisation’s best employees, they are the most skilled and can find new roles easily. Members of the IT team, who unwittingly initiated the mutiny, will feel they are having to push too hard to make Agile succeed. Their roles will feel overly challenging as they believe the organisation is trying to block them. In reality, the organisation doesn’t know how to support them. Meanwhile, members of other departments will see their processes and procedures starting to fail as they try to cope with operating a dual model. Their working day will be more challenging and chaotic.

As people start to leave, tacit knowledge drains from the organisation. A negative feedback loop has been created, which is exceptionally difficult to change. The ship has been overthrown. The [unintentional] mutiny has succeeded.

Identifying a Mutiny

From the information provided above, it should be relatively straightforward to identify when a mutiny is starting.  However, adopting Agile feels so simplistic and so plausible that it isn’t deemed to carry risk. After all, Agile has been around for over 20 years and some of its adopters have grown from start-up to global giants within this time. But, as we have stated above, a bottom-up approach to Agile adoption, especially through the IT team, can be devastating. It can also be challenging to directly identify a mutiny when most organisations are in a constant state of transition due to digital adoption, new technologies and approaches, and external changes and challenges.

The three key ways to identify if your organisation is facing a potential mutiny are:

1. An innocuous move to Agile within the IT department, when your organisation isn’t currently an Agile organisation
2. Increased friction between departments, especially between IT and other departments
3. Key people starting to leave whilst stating chaos and/or process changes as their leaving factors

The items above represent three discrete stages. At each stage an investigation can be performed to understand if a mutiny is underway:

1. At this stage it is completely possible to prevent the mutiny. Working with the IT team at this stage is recommended to understand their view of the organisation, the challenges that are being faced and how technology and potentially Agile could be used to enhance the operating model
2. At this stage it is hard to unpick the changes thus far, but it is possible. Understanding if Agile is indeed the right approach for the organisation is key, whilst working with all departments to understand what changes would be required to potentially adopt Agile or other more modern methodologies
3. At this stage, it is possible, but very challenging to recover. Agile will be well embedded in the IT team. Legal, sales, PMO,  reporting, finance, support, etc. will already be impacted. Several key staff may have left. A pause is recommended to consider the current operating model, how Agile would benefit/hinder this, and understand the changes that are required to restructure the organisation for a more modern way of working

Preventing a mutiny

The ideal position for any organisation is to prevent a mutiny.

IT teams want to adopt Agile because it has been proven as a cornerstone of modern, digital organisations. IT mutineers see its success and can visualise how Agile would improve their ability to support their colleagues and organisation. Agile isn’t a malicious choice, it is deemed the only choice for a digital organisation by an IT team.

If your organisation hasn’t considered Agile, as an organisation wide approach, it should. Even if it is considered and rejected, the act of reviewing and evaluating the current operating model is of huge benefit. Competitors and new start-ups are adapting and emerging. Constantly. If you are not considering how your organisation can adapt, the technologies and innovations you can adopt, the processes and procedures you can streamline and improve, you will simply become defunct. The mutiny being discussed here, by probably the most insightful individuals in the organisation, is the IT team’s last ditch effort to take control of a potentially sinking ship.

Final Thought

Whilst this type of mutiny is related to the adoption of Agile, it is unlikely Agile will endure. Waterfall methodologies suited a world of fermentation, contemplation, and discussion, but the world has outgrown this approach in favour of Agile. There are many challenges with Agile methodologies but, it is a good stepping stone to whatever follows. Any organisation that is faced with a digital revolution must be able to adapt, quickly, to survive. Agile is a good start.