Follow me, I’m right behind you

A great number of incumbents are carrying out Agile transformation programs to achieve more flexibility, efficiency and customer orientation, triggered by the disruptive approaches of some new entrants and FinTechs. This might just become one of the most ambitious transformations these organizations have ever gone through. How can top-level management inspire the organization to take part in this crucial endeavor? They need to take the lead by practicing Agile principles themselves.

An Agile transformation requires changes at three different levels:

• Technological change: putting in place new tooling and technologies to support more automated and flexible testing, configuration, release and versioning. Generally, incumbents are rather experienced in big implementations. Despite the complexity of building these DevOps capabilities, this part of the transformation may be the most obvious.
• Organizational change: reshaping the decision processes and building the appropriate skillset for the new organizational roles. Process descriptions, team composition, hierarchical lines, and personal capabilities will need to be aligned to the new target operating model.
• Cultural change: changing the culture of an organization implies changing the way employees behave and are managed in their daily activities. It will require continuous and intense coaching. This will impact habits that have been the de factonorm for many years.

Humans tend to develop these habits through imitation and experience of success or failure. The human brain will unconsciously store successful attempts as best practices. Inspiring people are imitated. For children this mainly comes down to copying parents’ behavior. Later, people will start imitating inspiring leaders. Therefore, to achieve the cultural change towards an Agile organization, it is crucial that organization leaders also apply Agile principles themselves. When those principles will be successfully applied at boardroom level, and adequately documented and available, they will be the inspiration for other leaders.

Agile management teams apply scrum principles as backlog prioritization, sprints, T-shaped team members, daily stand-ups, and visual management of the backlog:

• Impacts on the long term vision are split into epics and user stories. Periodically, this backlog is prioritized by the management team itself. Epics with the highest priority will be refined and taken up first.
• For the duration of a sprint, usually varying from 2 to 4 weeks, a stable set of top priorities is established as a basis for this sprint. Once a task is taken up, it has one owner which will work towards closing the task before the end of the sprint.
• T-shaped management teams let go of the principle of having clear-cut responsibilities and embrace the idea of the whole team being responsible for general management, while recognizing all team members have different knowledge areas.
• Thirty-minute daily stand-up meetings replace the monthly management marathon meetings. Each management team member informs the rest of the team about their achievements, planned tasks and impediments which are blocking progress. Depending on agenda issues, physical meetings could be replaced by conference calls, potentially during commuting.
• Transparency to the rest of the organization could be ensured through giving access to the visuals supporting the sprint and backlog management. This way, it is crystal clear what the top-level priorities are, which tasks are in progress and who is accountable for its execution.

In 2012, Haley Reinhart was singing “Follow me, I’m right behind you”. Though she was most probably not talking about Agile transformations, it may illustrate why some transformations have failed. Leading by example could significantly increase chances of success, by impacting the most difficult part of the change: the culture which is often strongly embedded in the organization and the mindset of people working there.

The Agile revolution has started. It is up to you as a leader to show the example and make it a success within your organization.