By Linky van der Merwe

Recently I was involved with setting up the Governance guidelines for our Agile Delivery Framework at work. I realized that many Agile Project Leaders would benefit from a break-down of the what, the why and the how of governance on Agile projects, especially in an enterprise organization.

Definition of Governance

There are a few good definitions for governance in an agile context. I liked the following ones.

“Governance is the alignment of an initiative (project, programme or product development) with organisational goals to create value. Governance defines how the initiative is set up, managed and controlled. Agile governance is the application of Lean-Agile values, principles and practices to the task of governance.”

Disciplined Agile (DA)

“Agile governance is a process that projects or programs apply to ensure that projects are aligned with the needs or expectations of their stakeholders as well as ensuring that delivery of such projects while adhering to the existing protocols consisting of lean-based agile principles and practices that are applicable in agile-focused projects or programs.”

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Disciplined Agile (DA) goes further in this article to explain governance: https://www.pmi.org/disciplined-agile/people/governing-agile-teams

“Governance establishes chains of responsibility, authority and communication in support of the overall enterprise’s goals and strategy. It also establishes measurements, policies, standards and control mechanisms to enable people to carry out their roles and responsibilities effectively.”

Disciplined Agile

Principles for effective agile governance

The following principles are recommended by Disciplined Agile for effective governance in agile:

1. Collaboration with delivery teams is more effective than trying to force them to conform. IT professionals are intellectual workers, the type of people whom are more likely to do what you want when you work with them to do so rather than tell them to do so.
2. Enabling teams to do the “right thing” is more effective than trying to inspect it in. One examples would be when you want developers to follow common coding conventions. Instead of doing code inspections, it would be easier to adopt a code analysis tool such as CheckStyle and include it in your continuous integration (CI) strategy.
3. Continuous monitoring provides more timely insight than quality gate reviews. Team dashboards that use business intelligence (BI) technology to display real-time measures generated by the use of your development tools have become very common in the past few years. This enables both the team and their stakeholders to monitor the team’s progress in a continuous real-time manner. This is much more effective than traditional “quality gate” reviews of artifacts because the information displayed on the dashboards is automatically generated.
4. Transparency into teams provides better insight than status reports. Through application of strategies such as information radiators, team dashboards and active stakeholder participation, the work of a disciplined agile delivery team is effectively transparent.

Axelos.com also provides four guiding principles to enable successful governance of Agile delivery

1. Governance should mirror the Agile manifesto principles, particularly the art of simplicity – maximizing the work not done is essential
2. Agile delivery teams decide on the empirical performance metrics they will use and self-monitor. Teams quantify their performance and use the data to improve. Teams display progress status information visually, updating it frequently. This makes progress transparent to everyone including senior management.
3. Collaboration is an essential change in mindset. As drivers of strategy and direction, senior leadership champion the implementation of an agile culture for the whole organization. A transparent culture surfaces issues or blockers without fear of blame. Good agile governance and by extension successful organizations share knowledge, collaborate and remove barriers that foster organizational silos. Delivery teams are therefore given an environment, workspace and tools to collaborate, self-organize and deliver.
4. Independent reviews of Agile delivery should focus on the teams’ behaviours and practices and not just processes and documentation.  When using Agile, the mindset for the organization is to adapt the governance, assurance and approval processes, and to consider different indicators of success. The usual principles of assurance remain but assessment relies more on observation and engagement with the delivery team and stakeholders, rather than reporting and information reviews.

In conclusion Axelos is saying that agile governance is about defining the fastest route that brings the most value.

Why Agile Delivery Governance?

A good agile delivery governance strategy will enable and motivate IT delivery teams to do the following.

• Fulfill your organization’s strategies and objectives
• Regularly and consistently create real business value
• Provide appropriate return on investment (ROI)
• Deliver consumable solutions in a timely and relevant manner
• Work effectively with their project stakeholders
• Adopt processes and organizational structure that encourage successful IT solution delivery
• Present accurate and timely information to project stakeholders
• Mitigate the risks they face.

How Disciplined Agile Teams Are Governed

DA recommends strategies that enable delivery governance. These strategies are: (my summarized view)

• Enterprise awareness. Agile teams need to realize that they work within your organization’s enterprise ecosystem, as do all other teams. There are often existing systems in production that should not be negatively impacted by the release of the solution they are working on. They will work with other teams in parallel, striving to leverage each other’s work. They will work towards your organization’s business and technical visions. Enterprise awareness is the underpinning of effective governance.
• Release planning.  High-level release planning happens early on when you identify and think through any dependencies on other teams and try to identify a reasonable cost and time estimate for the current release that they are working on. The high-level plan is kept up-to-date as development progresses, and shared with stakeholders. Release planning enables the team to answer critical governance questions regarding projected schedule and cost.
• Team dashboard.  The tools used by your team should be instrumented to record important events when they occur. For example, your team management tool could record when a work item is defined, when work begins on it, when the work is validated (if appropriate), and when it is marked done. This sort of information can be recorded in a data warehouse and later reported on using business intelligence (BI) tooling via a project or portfolio dashboard. The real-time, accurate information radiated by a team dashboard enables the team to make better decisions and provides better transparency to stakeholders (including governance people).
• Information radiators. An information radiator is a visible display that shows something of interest to a team or their stakeholders like a whiteboard with an architecture sketch on it, or a wall-mounted monitor showing the team’s dashboard. Information radiators enable better governance by increasing transparency.
• Active stakeholder participation. Active stakeholder participation is the practice of having on-site access to stakeholders, or at least their proxies (i.e. Product Owners). Active stakeholders have the authority and ability to provide information and make timely decisions regarding the prioritization and scope of requirements. This enables more effective governance through improving the team’s access to decision makers.
• Demos. Typically, at the end of each iteration, teams which follow Scrum, will demonstrate the solution to key stakeholders and invite feedback. This practice is also called stakeholder demonstration or sprint demonstration. This enables effective governance by increasing transparency and providing better opportunities for stakeholders to steer the team.
• Coordination meetings. The team meets daily, to coordinate their activities. This practice is often called a scrum meeting or daily stand up meeting. This enables tactical governance within the team itself through increasing internal transparency and reducing the feedback cycle within the team.
• Light-weight, risk-based milestones. Effective reviews are as simple and short as possible.  A small co-located team will spend an hour walking the PO and business stakeholders through whatever is to be reviewed. For larger efforts this could be up to half a day in regulatory environments more time and effort need to be invested, particularly around creation and baselining of artifacts to be reviewed and recording of action items from the review.
• Retrospectives. A retrospective is a facilitated reflection meeting performed by the team, with the goal of identifying potential areas of improvement, supporting your overall governance goal of continuous improvement.

These strategies support a light weight approach to governance while improving the overall effectiveness of the team.

Governance Practices and Principles

Finally, an International Journal article published in sciencedirect.com summarised Agile practices and principles to be followed for Governance as follows.

1. Ensure value driven delivery – use end solution orientation
2. Ensure stakeholder engagement
3. Boost team performance practices
4. Establish a transparent collaborative work environment
5. Utilise adaptive planning
6. Welcome changes throughout the project
7. Employ problem detection and resolution
8. Employ continuous improvements in products, people and processes
9. Conduct Value Measurements by considering strategic objectives, metrics, targets and savings.
10. Agree Agile metrics to be used on Portfolio level as well as on Program and Team level

The focus is on delivering outputs and results, rather than tasks and milestones. Strive for simplicity – bring just enough process and documentation, while keeping a constant balance between rigidity and responsiveness of methods, processes and tools. 

In conclusion it seems that agile teams are significantly easier to govern than traditional teams as a result of greater transparency and accurate and timely development data.

Click here to download a Guide to effective Agile Governance