TL;DR: I submit that Blockchain assists with the fundamental problem of Agile integration into large corporations, which is communication at scale. For the idea, scroll to the bottom of this article ;)

This is a look into Blockchain technologies, organisational theories and Agile methodologies. I show that there are strengths within Blockchain that complement the weaknesses of Agile and bring out the best in what it offers. I’ll keep this article at a high level whilst next week diving into each topic in further detail.

Agile

For many years Agile integration or transition has been subject to many issues. A leading issue is transition and integration. Recently it has been of great interest observing other large banking organisations announce large transitions towards Agile and not just for their software development or ‘Digital’ teams. One of the challenges that can come from these transitions are team cohesion and communication. How do you combat the major issues that arise from phenomenons such as silos? Or department fracturing? These can combine with a misinterpretation of Agile methodologies, which have led to areas embracing their own form of ‘Agile’, which leads to further silos and fracturing. Once this happens your organisation can be subject to costly retroactive fixing, such as restructuring or a full scale restart of the transition process in order to get the roll-out correct.

I don’t personally blame these organisations. Agile is hard. Transitions to a new work methodology are made harder when the documented process is frankly, wafer thin. As a researcher, it was surprising to see very little academic studies completed on Agile’s many forms such as Scrum and SAFe. However a major theme around the literature was a call for Communication and it’s efficacy within Agile teams. How does communication work on a large scale within software development cycles? The answer lies in the complexity of the communication structure. This is where we now dive into what I think is a fundamentally important organisational theory, Coordination.

Coordination and Organisational Theory

Thomas Malone is an American Organisational Theorist, who penned a paper in 1988 called What is Coordination Theory? He defined it as “the additional information processing performed when multiple, connected actors pursue goals that a single actor pursuing the same goals would not perform.” — TW Malone, 1988. Malone’s work is hugely important here. In regards to his written work on complexity, he advocates that there are two main systems: centralised and decentralised where each have their advantages and disadvantages.

For centralised systems such as a standard work hierarchy, each job position is known, fixed, less complex and as a result, requires a minimal amount of communication between peers in order to achieve the project’s goals. However this system is subject to a risk of failure if one job position is compromised such as a person falling ill. The risk is because each job position in this system is fixed and cannot be easily modified.

For decentralised systems such as an Agile software team running Scrum, there is a ‘fluidity’ between roles where job positions are not strictly fixed, such as a UX designer moving between projects. This setup reduces the risk seen in centralised systems where roles can be modified to suit the project’s goals. However the cost to this is an increase in the complexity of the system. And when you have complexity, Malone argues that the rate of communication must increase in proportion in order to maintain stability.

This complexity and communication trade-off of where I see Agile struggling when trying to maintain team cohesion during the transition towards the methodology in large organisations. I have previously written that people within organisations can suffer Information Overload when they are being bombarded with instant messaging and this is where silos start to appear. What I’ll now talk about is how Blockchain technologies may offer a solution.

Blockchain

Blockchain is still a contentious issue. It has unfavourably earned a ‘Corporate Buzzword’ amongst my peers and up and coming experts on Blockchain have voiced their disapproval towards the notion that Blockchain = Bitcoin. I tend to agree with the supporters. Blockchain offers an incredible amount of possibilities towards system design and validation of information. Organisations such as IBM already have the tech embedded in their technology framework and are seeing great results. For this article I’m going to talk about a way it can help in organisational design and bringing out the best in Agile.

As mentioned earlier, Agile at scale is difficult and one of the main reasons is communication and team cohesion. How do you maintain healthy communication between peers whilst balancing this with both work load and cognitive load?

Source: IOTA 2017

The potential solution

Coordination theory talks about the trade-off between centralised and decentralised systems. Agile, being decentralised, requires increasing amounts of communication as the complexity grows, such as team and division size. The areas I see in this complexity is:

what is everyone doing?

how is what I’m doing contributing to the overall project?

what information is relevant to me today?

can my work be validated quickly so that I can get on with my work?

For small teams and companies these questions are moot as they can be communicated immediately. But as organisations grow in complexity, these conversations grow in number as well with the validation and understanding of what is relevant can take time and resources to accomplish. In standard industry practice, these questions can be addressed in a very manual way. Email, meetings and presentations. All time consuming and eat away at productivity if overdone. But what if we integrate Blockchain here? Specifically, what if we take the best aspects of similar to Blockchain, such as IOTA and reduce the manual and time consuming areas of our work?

IOTA itself is a beautiful evolution to Blockchain technology in my opinion. It’s beautiful in that it works and thrives on scale which allows for ‘transactions’ to be free and efficient as the complexity grows. At a high level, when making a transaction, IOTA requires a user to validate two other randomly assigned users’ transactions whilst others are validating yours. As the user base grows, the time taken to validate transactions shrinks. IOTA refers to this process as the ‘Tangle’. It follows similar principles to Emergence theory that observes organisation that arises out of complex systems. If you’d like to read more about IOTA, head over to The Tangler’s article explaining it.

Model of the solution

What I would propose is a model that can be facilitated using software or through an analogue system that essentially achieves these requirements:

A Kanban style digital wall for the project, which can be drilled down to each team and then each team member to see progress at a macro and micro level. Validation of your work is completed by other team members with the same or similar qualifications. Further discussion can occur if theed bed When submitting your work to be validated you also do the same for other team members that are randomly assigned to you The work validation must either meet the agreed best practice from the daily standup with fresh ideas and insight to be shared in the next standup For knowledge sharing such as customer research or articles, when an article is going to be sent out, it should tagged and then validated by two other team members who fall into the tagged categories

Summary

What these five rules set out to achieve is a reduction of the noise within organisations as they scale. Team members can see what’s going at a glance whilst not getting bogged down on meetings that aren’t required in order to progress. At the same time it helps balance out the communication whilst still maintaining the structure of the decentralised system.

As a self critique, I was contemplating whether this system should be anonymous to remove bias from validations. I think that would work better providing that the organisation was of significant scale where anonymity would thrive.