The Turning Point: A Novel About Agile Architects Building a Digital Foundation

Immediately after being given her assignment, Terri begins working on the Architecture Governance structure. She had already come across lots of material in The Open Group Library that she could use to help her shape the new governance function. Terri reminds herself that she will need a strong transition plan to lead the organization from project-based governance to an Agile, digital product-based governance structure.

Terri thinks through who the stakeholders would be for the new governance structure. Since they currently have both project-based and Agile/DevOps-based governance and are now moving to digital product-based governance, she needs to include all of the roles currently involved, such as project managers and Scrum masters. She comes up with a stakeholder list: Strategists, Architects, Business Relationship Managers, Portfolio Managers, Change Managers, Product Owners, Developers, and Operations. This covers all the roles that participate in the care and feeding of the product/service lifecycle. Another group Terri thinks would be important for representing the customer is the service center. She puts together a list of the names of representatives from each of the stakeholder groups that she thinks is needed to get this new governance structure up-and-running.

The toughest part about this effort, thinks Terri with some concern, is going to be getting agreement between the project-based people, who rally around regular gate reviews and excessive structure, and the intense Agile, MVP people, who like to try things out with very little structure in place. Both extremes have their valid points. We will need to go fast, she notes, with new technology, but it needs to be done with guardrails in place. So we will need to establish the minimum set of guardrails to both allow people the velocity they need, but also to keep them on track to safeguard the security, quality, customer satisfaction, and cost aspects of our digital solutions.

Terri quickly drafts a memo to the stakeholder representatives and their management, letting them know about the plan for a new governance structure and laying out a schedule. This effort will require leadership backing for the development of a new governance structure and its ongoing sustainment.

Thinking about all that has been done to date as part of the Digital Customer Intimacy strategic theme, Terri feels as though her team will be off to a good start on this new governance. The TOGAF and IT4IT Standard implementations are already in place, as is the automated pipeline for initiatives from Strategy to Operations, which includes the Architecture Repository and its connections to Development, Fulfillment, and Operations.

Referring back to the TOGAF Standard, Terri finds the section on Architecture Governance^[1] that clearly spells out the key elements for governance. She will need a cross-organizational Architecture Board, a comprehensive set of Architecture Principles, and an Architecture Compliance strategy with specific measures.

The TOGAF Standard also provides a list of catalogs that can be developed for governance and reference purposes.^[2] Value streams and business capabilities are at the top of the list. Pondering this, Terri comes to the conclusion that a catalog of value streams and business capabilities would be extremely helpful to ensure that architects have what they need to assess business capabilities against the company’s key value streams.

As Terri continues to pore through references that might help her to get a handle on the right amount of governance to impose in an Agile environment, she finds information in the DPBoK Standard^[3] that states: “The conflict between Agile methods and traditional approaches revolves around the transition from a single, collaborative team to a ‘team of teams’ requiring coordination, and the eventual institution of architecture and governance practices”.

This may be the kind of backup I will need, thinks Terri, to convince the “governance naysayers” that we will need just enough governance in place to coordinate standards and guidance across a team of teams. If we give staff the enablers they need, like building blocks, compliance checklists, catalogs, principles, and reference architectures, it will be much easier for them to comply to standards and guidelines. We’ll need to be sure our repository of information is easy to navigate and accessible to all staff, and we’ll also need to be sure to keep lines of communication concerning changes to procedure open to all of the teams and ensure clear expectations for adherence to policies. We need to make sure to prevent excessive gate reviews by having regular interactions with the teams to convey the vision and expected outcomes.

Terri leans back in her chair, tired of analyzing. She feels she is losing her creativity and starting to get blocked. Brutus her dog, sensing her change in focus, and ever the opportunist, decides to make her aware it must now be time for a walk. She smiles at Brutus, her loyal companion. She would have gone nuts without him, working from home for so long.

“Come on then!” says Terri, grabbing his leash. She picks Brutus up and they take the elevator down to start their normal stroll through the park. As usual when walking in the park, her mind starts to drift and, before she knows it, she realizes a lot has been done already in support of the two stream-aligned teams of the Digital Customer Intimacy initiative. She pauses, nodding her head as she goes through each of the changes that have already been implemented: we have embedded the architects into the stream-aligned teams and they are participating in the major ceremonies, such as sprint planning; and we also introduced ADRs as a practice to capture architecture decisions made in teams.

Brutus pulls at the leash, but Terri is deep in thought, planning to recommend that this practice is continued and rolled out to the wider organization. “Yes Brutus,” she says. “We can provide the teams with the support they need and give them the means to be able to take responsibility. We can probably get by with performing audits – for example, using retrospectives – when no other option is available.” Terri is smiling, but Brutus does not look impressed, especially when Terri ignores his attempts to make her speed up. “This shouldn’t be needed very often if we give guidance up-front to be sure policies and procedures are being followed. It will be much better than checking after the fact in gate reviews. Yes, it will Brutus! This should make us a lot more Agile.” Finally, she lets Brutus off his leash and throws his favorite ball.

When she is back from her walk, completely refreshed, she understands where the current challenge is. What we have implemented, she now realizes, provides the feedback loop that we need to manage the realization of the strategy and its architecture; however, defining the guidance is currently too much focused on the team level, not on the coordination across the teams, nor on the overall direction of the company.

Although her first reaction is to implement a Board to facilitate decision-making, she realizes it will create a gate with a queue and wait time, which is exactly what she wants to prevent. On the team level, she thinks, we have been able to use planning sessions and have embedded architecture into the work. Perhaps we can do something here as well.

Pausing for a moment, Terri notices that the team of teams concept from the DPBoK Standard [1] could very well be the place where coordination and guidance of architecture across the teams can be done. She concludes her notes by outlining the point she wants to make: by implementing the team of teams approach for each of the main value streams and embedding architecture into the ceremonies we can coordinate the collaboration across closely-related teams, but the enterprise level is something else.

Unfortunately, she is not able to quickly find a solution and decides, in frustration, to shut down her laptop, call it a night, and deal with it tomorrow.

The next morning, Terri is driving back to the office when it hits her. As an organization, she realizes, we have already implemented a QBR process. This has allowed the product owners to align the future of our products and services with the business and collect future demand, just like a typical sales organization does with its customers.

Smiling behind the wheel of her car, Terri decides to use this meeting to discuss the priorities, objectives, and results of each of the value streams. Each value stream can be represented by the lead from the team of teams setup. They can discuss this with the other stakeholders in an alignment meeting and we will ask ourselves a simple question: when we add everything up, does it enable the company to realize its strategic goals? [23].

In the office, she spends an hour finalizing her notes to outline the results of her investigation. All in all, she is happy with the conclusions: good guidelines, enablers, and guardrails in place will assure the quality, and having frequent, interactive communication of the standards and guidelines, as well as expectations, will be the key to successfully removing gates. Working together and communication are really two of the keys to being able to decentralize decision-making and empower teams. Adjusting the way we plan and coordinate across the autonomous teams provides us with the means to govern and direct the organization without ivory towers.

Because social distancing measures are still in place, Terri schedules a virtual meeting with all of the stakeholder groups. She is confident that she has selected the right stakeholders to help her get the new governance in place. Terri always likes coming to a stakeholder meeting with some ideas in hand to get conversations started, so she prepares a series of slides to frame the need for a new governance structure and what should be included at a minimum to keep work flowing in an Agile way and ensure the consideration of quality, security, and budget constraints.

To view Terri’s slides, see The Stakeholder Meeting on Architecture Governance.

Terri opts to hold the kickoff meeting for developing the Agile governance structure virtually since many of the stakeholders are geographically dispersed. She starts out with the “burning platform”^[4] she has put together in Governance “Burning Platform”.

Terri is pleasantly surprised when she is able to get agreement from all but two very staunch Agile supporters. The others all agree that there needs to be some oversight in place and that Enterprise Architecture seems to be the likely candidate for ensuring the traceability of work being done on products and services from Strategy to Operations and also for Disposition. Disposition has not been a focus previously for the company and that has led to a lot of legacy technology still in the environment that is not being used, which has created technical debt.

She starts to go through her slides, telling the stakeholder group that the pre-work she did is just to get some conversation going and she encourages feedback. The group likes the core principles and corresponding questions that would help teams ensure they will stay in line with them. A couple of people say that they would like to study them more to see if there are additional questions that should be added.

“That would be great!” says Terri. “I am also envisioning that whatever we start out with will evolve as we bring our work through this governance structure.”

The group is also in favor of developing the suggested catalogs and thinks these will be extremely helpful enablers for people as they begin to follow the governance standards and guidance.

Next, Terri brings up two slides on the Governance Operating Model. First is the Governance Charter and Membership and the other is the Governance Structure. For the most part, the team agrees with the Charter and the Membership she has outlined. There is a little bit of grumbling from the two Agile die-hards about avoiding too much regulation and protecting their DevOps team’s need to be self-governing.

“Yes,” replies Terri. “That’s exactly what we need. All teams must be self-governing using our principles to guide them and our standards for consistency, with traceability from Strategy all the way through to Disposition.”

“I keep hearing you say we need traceability,” one of the Agile DevOps guys challenges her, “but what the heck do you really mean by that?”

“Great question,” says Terri. “Let me give you an example. Remember last year when there was work being done on some great new augmented reality technology that could save cycle time and reduce travel because people who needed technical support on some of our digital platforms would be able to stay at their location instead of wasting time by having the expert fly to us? The augmented reality digital initiative actually started in our Advanced Technology group. They had been trying out the technology but did not have a solid use-case. There wasn’t anything on the strategy roadmap and nothing to tie it to a business strategic theme. The initial work that was done by the Advanced Technology group kind of died on the vine eventually. Until recently, when the pandemic hit. Now there are lots of use-cases because people are being encouraged not to travel by plane.”

Terri pauses, anticipating a challenge and continues when no one speaks. “None of the work that was done by the Advanced Technology group was captured anywhere, so we are starting over from scratch. We have been able to tie it into the Digital Workplace strategic theme which is linked to several value streams. The solution can now be employed for use-cases that were identified as digital opportunities in the value streams. Traceability comes in when we are able to confirm that the architecture is consistent with the design and the implemented solution and that there is an owner identified to sustain the service.” She pauses again. The faces on her computer screen are focused, listening. She begins to feel more hopeful.

“We have to ensure that all along the way the value identified in the value stream has been delivered as expected by the customer. We want to have traceability for all of our products and services across the company for a few reasons. When changes are required, we will have all of the necessary information to make an informed decision about which processes, roles, information, and tools will be impacted across a value stream. Having that traceability along the product/service lifecycle will make the impacts from changes more visible. Additionally, at every point in the product/service lifecycle we can validate that important policies, procedures, and guidance are being followed so our solutions are consistent and have the required security and quality. We actually automated where key information is being stored in our core systems last year, which will make this a lot easier to do than it would have been in the past. For example, this has made it easier to find information about products and services from the time they were an Idea to the time they were deployed to production.” Terri looks up from the screen and takes a breath.

“So,” she continues, fully in her stride now and feeling far more confident, “the desire is that we will not have to do gate reviews in the future. Teams will self-govern based on all of the guidance communicated to them. Enterprise Architecture will stay involved with development through Operations with design-level involvement and periodic audits.” She takes a deep breath and concludes, “We are here to help you be more Agile. We are not here to hinder you as may have been the case in previous governance structures that required stringent gate reviews.”

“Wow!” Both of the Agile DevOps guys speak in unison and stare at Terri in amazement.

“You mean,” says the one who had been speaking out against governance the most, “we are all going to work together in the future and the governance will be across the entire product/service lifecycle? Does that mean there won’t be any separation between the Architects, DevOps, Security, and Support?”

“Yep, that is the plan. We will enable the autonomy by creating cross-functional teams using the team backlogs we’ve already implemented. We will align the teams which work together on a value stream into an Agile Release Train (ART),^[5] each ART being fully responsible for the end-to-end value stream. We will be using Program Increment planning events to align the work between the teams. No more siloed organizational units. So, are you on board?” Terri challenges them gently.

They both respond with a resounding, “Yes!”

“OK then,” says Terri, with a smile. “Let’s move on to the next topic of discussion, which is the frequency of meetings. I would like to start with weekly meetings while we are getting the Architecture Repository built up with standards and guidance, including catalogs, building blocks, reference architectures, and checklists. Once we have everything in place it will just be a matter of keeping it current. Is that OK?”

Everyone agrees and Terri moves on to her final topic: Governance Structure (Governance Structure). She points out the Governance Board at the top of the product/service lifecycle.

“I am envisioning that these would be the core members of the governance team using the QBR ceremony to drive the direction of the company, govern alignment, and give guidance across the whole organization. The extended team members at the bottom are contributors to the standards and guidelines and would attend meetings as needed, depending on the agenda.”

“OK everyone,” Terri says, clasping her hands in front of her. “That’s everything I have for today. Thank you for your feedback so far. Does anyone have anything to add?”

Sarah Condor, the Head of PMO speaks up. “I am extremely pleased with what I am seeing here. This has been needed for quite some time. Thanks so much for taking the lead and for all of the research you have done on governance. The best part about all of this is that we will be working together toward common goals and we can actually see how products and services flow through the lifecycle and what needs to be delivered from Strategy through Operations. You are absolutely right that by centralizing our information, change management will be so much easier, which will make us go faster. This is all good.”

Kathleen parked her car, glad she could get this close to the entrance. Normally, she’d have to walk because the parking lot fills up quickly. It’s pouring down with rain and she makes a mental note, now that the pandemic is under control and everyone is starting to return to normal life, to put her umbrella back in the car after working at home for months. It’s Friday night and earlier that day she had rushed out of the office to be home for the dinner party planned for her daughter’s birthday, but when she got home she realized she’d forgotten her purse, and tomorrow they would go shopping so she decided to go back and get it the same evening.

Her plan was to just go in, say hello to Bart Sanders from building security, get the purse, wish Bart a good night, leave, and be home in 30 minutes from now. She glances up at the building as she walks in and notices lights burning on the second floor, which is strange.

“Hey Bart, how are you doing tonight, everything quiet in the office?” Kathleen greets Bart in the lobby.

“Not too bad with me, thanks, but I have to say, tonight is busy. Normally, Friday night is peaceful and I’m spending most of it alone, but this weekend a number of the Finance team are up there on the second floor. Working late on Friday night doesn’t happen a lot, so there must be something wrong. Are you here to help them as well?”

“No, I just came over to pick up my purse I had forgotten. You mean it’s the Finance team up there on the second floor?”

“Exactly. They’ve not left the office. They just ordered pizza and kept going. Does seem something is wrong – nobody would stay on a Friday night just for the fun of it.”

Actually, Kathleen and her team had been able to reduce the overtime dramatically lately. The new way of working was becoming the norm; the organization was more responsive to changes than ever, the new digital products were a success and gaining traction on the market, and the last time she worked late was because of the Hackathon they had organized.

“See you in a minute.” Kathleen steps into the elevator.

Against her better judgment, she decides to stop at the second floor on her way down. She can never resist a challenge and she wants to know what’s going on. When she enters the finance area, she sees all the finance leads of the different Business Units sitting in the large conference room, talking in small groups. She recognizes listing numbers on the whiteboards positioned around the room.

“Hey Kathleen. I did not expect to see you at this hour, what are you doing here?”

Startled, Kathleen spins around to find Fiona Hoekstra, the company CFO looking at her expectantly.

“Oh! Hi Fiona, I didn’t see you there! I had to swing back to the office because I forgot my purse. But I could ask you the same thing as I didn’t expect all of you to be here. Bart told me people in Finance are still working, and according to him, given the hour, it must be important. I thought I’d say hello and see if I can help?”

“It is important,” says Fiona, looking a little grim. “I’m not sure if you can help, but if you agree that what I’m about to tell you won’t leave this room, then I’ll fill you in.”

Fiona explains that she and Brad will be meeting with the Board of Directors in a special meeting by the end of next week to discuss the future of the company. One of the Board members had heard there is an activist shareholder trying to form a consortium to gain enough voting power to force a decision on breaking up the company. The Board member has started to form a counter strategy, which was to find a friendly buyer, and is asking his fellow Board members to agree to start scanning the market to allow them to be prepared at the next shareholder meeting.

Brad, however, had pushed back hard. His argument being that revenue was increasing now that the digital products were picking up. The Board was positive on the turnaround, but needed to understand the contribution of each of the digital products and the profitability of the Business Units. They had not forgotten the investments made following the merger, and the failure of the initial program. For them, a perfect way out would be to sell the company, leaving the shareholders with a nice return. On the other hand, if the profit of the combined products was showing a good enough return and all Business Units show future profits, they would be on the forefront of fighting the battle to prevent a break-up or sell-off, but for this they needed more information. Fiona had been given a week to come up with the numbers.

Fiona and her team had spent most of Friday collecting all the necessary information to have all the details ready for the Monday morning management team meeting. All costs had been collected and allocated to the various parts of the company. They had spent time incorporating the allocation of cost to the digital products and, except for the technology cost, they had managed the allocation. They had collected all the technology costs they were aware of, like the personnel cost, the cost of the data centers and infrastructure, and the bills of the various service providers. That part was relatively easy, but the distribution of the cost was not. In the past they had always used a key to distribute a lump sum of the total technology cost to all the Business Units as part of the corporate cost. They had been using various keys, such as the number of employees, or the total revenue. But whatever key they had used, it always led to big discussions in the management team, with some of the Business Unit leaders arguing they had to pay more than their fair share. With the increase in technology cost as part of the digitalization program, there is likely to be more discussions and, unfortunately, there won’t be the time to do it right.

“I think Brad and I will need to force a decision and then deal with the consequences. My team is exhausted, so unless you have something that can help us within the next 15 minutes, I’m calling it a night and we’ll use the same key as last year.”

Kathleen’s mind is racing. By now she is very familiar with the IT4IT Standard and knows that Finance is covered as one of the supporting functions within the digital Value Network. She had never given it much thought but given the problem just described by Fiona, she was going through a mental checklist.

“What if I tell you we have been tracking the usage ourselves over the past months? I mean not by cost, but by using more and more automation, we are now able to track usage. We have been investing in a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) that is centered around the products and offerings we are providing to the market. For example, people are now working in stream-aligned teams, focused on the products we provide, not just a project, but for the whole lifecycle. This means we know which products each team is supporting. We have started to provide an automated catalog system to order infrastructure, which means everything is ordered in relation to a product. And we have rearranged the infrastructure services of internal and external service providers to show how their services are supporting the different products, which means there is a link from the infrastructure services to the products. We’ve been doing this to be able to improve efficiency, understand where things are not working as expected, and to identify the impact changes and incidents have on the products we as a company provide to our customers. It’s helped us to make a shift from projects to products. I wonder if this is actually something that can help you in this case, too? I mean we might still have to use distribution keys, but probably in much less of a lump-sum way.”

Fiona starts to smile. “I wish you had stepped in earlier. We don’t have time to detail all of this out in the next hour, but let’s take one example and work that out, so I can provide an alternative to the distribution key. If the management team agrees, we can then take the rest of the week to finalize cost distribution.”

After Kathleen has texted Sven to say she will be late, and Sven has responded by asking which part of the world is coming to an end that it needs to be done on a Friday night, she sits down with the Finance team and, using the information in the CMDB and the connected systems, they work out an example of distributing the cost to the different digital products, validating that the approach is sound.

At the end, Fiona feels comfortable enough to bring the result to the management team and arranges to contact Kathleen after Monday’s meeting to plan the next step.

The next Monday, Fiona walks into Kathleen’s office. “You know, this was the first time I have been able to get approval of all Business Unit leaders to accept the allocation of cost, and we have the approval to work out the rest as well.”

“That’s great Fiona. I am happy our investment in the IT4IT Standard is paying off on this front as well.”

“If I knew what you are talking about, I might agree,” says Fiona shaking her head. “However, I never understand this ‘tech-speak’. It just makes it complicated for me. I just want to track costs and assets so I can better manage the budget and recommend good investment decisions.”

“Exactly!” Kathleen replies, excited. “And I agree. It’s not the name of the standard that’s important, it’s what it does for us and for you. It has given us a framework and guidance we can use in solving our business challenges. Actually, let me show you something. The things you care about tracking like cost, budget, and assets are all embedded in this framework.”

Kathleen shows Fiona the four IT4IT value streams, highlighting the different elements mentioned. “We have been implementing the systems we internally use according to this framework, and although we did not do this to support the Finance department, it did show its value on Friday didn’t it?”

“So, you mean we could get all of this out of your IT4IT system?”

“Not really,” says Kathleen. “The IT4IT Standard itself is not a system or an application. It’s a reference architecture that helps us understand how we can best combine the different systems we use to support the needs of the business. We’ve used it as guidance to implement and integrate the parts we need to support our product operations. But! With a small investment to create an integration with your financial systems, we could, for example, create a proper asset management system. Would that be helpful?”

“Yes. But let’s leave that for later. Right now, I need your help preparing the rest of the cost allocations to be ready for this Board meeting.”

Throughout the rest of the week, Kathleen helps Fiona’s team with the cost allocation and late Friday night she gets a text message: “The Board is on board!”

In the following weeks, Kathleen works with one of the Finance leads to identify the information needs of the Finance team and where that information could be found within the existing systems. Together they create the investment Idea. Once that is approved, they create the necessary Backlog Items. A couple of weeks later, the first integrations come online and before long the setup is fine-tuned.

Three months later, Kathleen decides to join the shareholder meeting for the first time in her career. She owns a small number of shares, so she gets into the meeting and sits in the back. The tension is high and the activist shareholders do try to bring to a vote a proposal to break up the company, but Brad, Fiona, and the Chairman of the Board manage to convince the majority of shareholders that the best strategy is to continue on the path ArchiSurance has chosen. On her way out, Kathleen feels happy that she had not given up when she had that meeting with Dick. He was near to being out of a job, but as a team they have been able to turn it around.

“It is all your fault,” screams Hans Pickle as he walks into the room where Kathleen is working. “Because of your work, the go-live of the Prolongation Application replacement failed and we had to do a roll back.”

Kathleen looks up from her work to sees Hans, fuming and pointing frantically to a stack of papers in his other hand as if Kathleen was privy to what was on them.

“Oh don’t play dumb with me,” he continues, when Kathleen says nothing. “It’s all here in this post mortem report we had to do for the failed go-live. Because of your work, all kinds of new requirements are now added to the replacement, making it even more difficult to replace. Thank you very much! This is going to cost the organization time and money and I’m on my way to Brad to make it very clear exactly who’s to blame for this issue.” Hans turns and storms out of the room.

Kathleen has to stop herself from chasing after Hans. He always blames others and never wants to listen to any advice. In the CAB, where the release of the B.L.O.S. replacement was discussed, she had advised against it, indicating that the testing was not conclusive on the ability to provide all external systems with the information they need. She got into a heated debate with him, but, in the end, Hans had put all his weight behind the change and forced an approval, threatening anyone who stood in his way. Now, the only thing she wants to say to Hans is: “I told you so”. But, given the connections Hans has in the organization, she is not feeling very at ease.

Two hours later, she gets a request from Brad to come to his office and with her stomach churning she walks over.

As she enters the room, Brad, Dick, and Amy stop their conversation. Brad waves an outstretched hand to indicate an empty chair. “Hi Kathleen, thanks for joining us at such a short notice. Please take a seat. Recently, I have been following this B.L.O.S. replacement and, frankly, I am not happy with the current progress.”

“I am really sorry,” says Kathleen, looking at Dick and Amy for help. “But everything I did was to help the business to make sure they got what they needed.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” Brad cuts her off. “And that is exactly why I wanted to talk to you. Dick, Amy, and I have been talking about this and we have come to the conclusion that Hans’ approach is not what we need. Apparently, he has been blocking development of the digital products we need for our survival and, as I understand, your approach to find ways to help the business has been the right one. I do not know all the details of how this works, but I would like it if you can find a way to create an architecture to help us get rid of B.L.O.S.”

“Uh, yes,” replies Kathleen, her mind racing. “I think that is possible.”

Before she can continue, Brad replies, “That is fantastic, thank you so much. I am sure you will be able to do this, certainly after all the work you have done in architecting the way we operate as a company. I suggest you and Dick work out the details and report back to me next week.”

“For sure,” says Dick. “We will make an appointment with you to discuss the plan.”

Brad thanks them for their ongoing support, Dick and Amy start standing up, getting ready to leave. Kathleen gets the hint and follows their example. The three of them walk out of Brad’s office.

“What just happened? Where is Hans? Does the team know about this? Where …​? I do not know where to start!” says Kathleen.

“That’s a lot of questions! One: You got the assignment to re-architect the B.L.O.S. application. Two: I think Hans has come to the conclusion his skills are better suited on a different project. Three: No, the team does not know, but I think they would welcome the change. Four: I guess you can figure this out in the coming days,” replies Dick. “I am really sorry, but I’m running late. Please come by my office later today so we can discuss the details.” And off he goes leaving Kathleen, as usual, with more questions than answers.

“Let’s get a coffee,” says Amy, and they venture in the direction of the coffee corner. “And I guess this is a goodbye from me as well. Today’s my last day working here as an Agile coach. The last thing I think you should know is that since we met, I have been working with Brad on how his organization had to change. He noticed the change that began with the merger slowing down. He hired my company to help him with a restart and we decided to do this from within, so I became a consultant to help the organization make the change, and not just to coach the leadership.”

Now it starts to become clear to Kathleen. All this time it was Amy who had been keeping Brad aware of her plans and arranging encounters. Now it made sense why she was in the room with Brad and Dick this afternoon. As they drink their coffee, they discuss the various changes that have been made since they met, and they conclude that the organization is improving more and more. At the end they say their farewells with a promise to stay in touch.