Clarity, Movement, Alignment, Focus

This is the premise of a book called Simple Church. While Simple Church has nothing to do with agile methods, it has everything to do with agility. Its research indicates that most churches are weighed down by all of their various programs and fail to reach their goal - to grow disciples. The multitude of programs they are creating to increase participation and growth are the very thing that are preventing their growth due to fractioning and defocusing people on too many varying objectives. Each program fighting over the same limited resources. Each program success being measured by its own attendance. The programs become the focus. The overall goal is lost in the mix.

This is true for corporate organizations as well. Most organizational processes are not simple, clear and aligned directly to their primary goal, and often they are struggling to achieve it. And as organizations fail to achieve their goals, they often add additional processes and structures to fix it. Layer after layer, new processes and structures created for the purpose of reaching their goal are in fact serving to do just the opposite - they defocus an already overloaded organization with more work on processes and communication taking away from their true goal - in this case, to deliver value through software. This negative reinforcing cycle creates increased busywork and waste. In the end, the process itself becomes the goal.

Simple Churches are successful and growing. A Simple Church has a clear process that is easily understood which moves people toward discipleship. It aligns all of its ministries around this process and abandons everything else that falls outside to focus on the goal. Simple Churches have clarity, movement, alignment and focus.

Organizations who implement Scrum are growing and successful too. Primarily because Scrum provides clarity, movement, alignment, and focus. Scrum is a simple process framework that is clear to understand by everyone in the organization. It uses simple language, simple artifacts, simple meetings, and simple roles. Scrum creates movement of the most-valued product solutions delivered for the business. Scrum helps teams deliver early and often for rapid feedback and alignment. Scrum creates cross-discipline teams from multiple functions throughout the organizations aligned on this shared goal. Scrum focuses its teams on meeting their shared goals through regular time-boxed sprints. And Scrum provides a framework to identify and remove any distractions from that goal.

Whether you are in religious ministry or developing technical solutions to drive business, simplifying your approach is a critical success factor for your organization. Evaluate your organization. Do you have a simple and clearly defined process? Does your process create and measure movement toward your goal? Does everyone in the organization embody the process and can clearly articulate it? Is everyone in the organization aligned to the process and focused on its goal and allowed to say "no" to everything that falls outside of that goal?

NOTE: Don't confuse simple with easy. Simple is clear and understandable. Easy requires little effort. Scrum is simple, but it is not easy.