An organisation in transition

As I described in my post ‘amazing journey’ our company had major issues.

Amazing journey with my last big project

We had the following practices in place:

• Rigid form of project governance. IMHO the worst kind of project governance, aiming at accountability and control
• Scrum-teams using Water-Scrum-fall.
• Scrum teams without Product Owners
• Top-down organizational design. Control is with management. Some managers had an orientation to enable self-management, but this was based on individuals choices of the managers.
• And so on…

This organization already had seen several Agile transitions, using Scrum, that all failed at a certain point. I joined the company well after the previous transitions, but what I got from it is that one of the transitions was an uplifting experience for many and that it generally appeared to be successful. But it was ruined when new owners of the company had a totally different idea on how to make money and how to manage the company.

These failed transitions caused a lot of anger and dissatisfaction, going hand in hand with apathy. Some found that the approach to implement “Agile” was wrong, others got to hate Agile and Scrum altogether.

What’s worse: the productivity came to a standstill and clients left. This in an industry that was booming. Obviously things needed to change and below I describe how this has taken place.

Key constraints for the transition

First vital constraint to move ahead was that the company changed owners. We are now part of an organization that looks further than one year ahead. This allowed us to focus on mid to long term and with that also on things like: ‘what kind of company do we want to be’? The answer: we want to be a company ahead of the game and a company that people want to work for.

Second vital step was the arrival of a CTO strongly believing in the power of agility. He has been the enabler to take the vital steps.

The transition

At a certain point the Product Owners were (re-)introduced. Every (Scrum) team now had a PO again AND the PO determined the product backlog. Still we often saw how people external from the Scrum teams were breaking a sprint to remove or add work at will.

This was only a first step in the transformation. The next step, taken early this year, entailed a lot more. Below some of the essentials:

• Scrum will be re-implemented from scratch again.
• PO’s will be responsible for the product backlog. No-one else.
• The Scrum teams will be self-managing. They determine what will be picked up in a Sprint and they are the ones that change the Sprint backlog when needed.
• Managers will turn into servant leaders. They will enable the team to do their work properly and remove impediments.
• Teams are built up from scratch. As the teams were supposed to be self-managed people were enabled to form the teams themselves. This resulted in some minor changes to the teams. Most decided they wanted to keep on working with the same colleagues.
• Two Agile coaches will be guiding the process, being aligned with the company goals.

This change was quite drastic. Many within the company needed to leave the iron thrones. Many others needed to be convinced/needed to see that this time it would be going well.

How are we doing, half a year down the road?

Having self-managing teams working on different products means that we all have our own path and our own experiences. But in general I am inclined to say we are doing well.

The interesting thing is that the team with the biggest improvements, performing as one of the best with the highest motivation, is the one that struggled most in the previous set-up. My explanation for this is that they had the most to gain and that they embraced the opportunity. They were the ones that had the least to say about their own work. Other people planned for them. They had these changes for the better:

• They now have a Product Owner really owning the product backlog. Anyone wanting to have something changed needs to consult him and he determines the priority. Now the team doesn’t have the constant interruptions during the sprints anymore.
• The team is enabled to determine themselves how to do their job. No-one is making priority calls anymore during the sprint.
• The members of the team have the opportunity to reserve a part of the sprint on topics they find important themselves. Examples are:
• The development and testing environment got restructured
• Knowledge sharing sessions allowed them to improve skills
• The team is also enabled to come with impediments to be resolved by management. This is the team that is most actively engaged in raising issues to improve on all kinds of topics.
• The team now swarms on the stories in the backlog, instead of every individual working on one topic in isolation.

Due to all this we see some major benefits for the company as well:

• The team has become very predictable in their work.
• The team was able to drastically improve their productivity, adding many features to the product.
• The quality of the deliveries improved a lot. The software does what it is intended to do and there are far less bugs than before.

Other teams have a more mixed experience and these are some observations from my side:

• A team that had a relatively safe position in the previous set-up was disrupted by the transition. They have had quite some difficulties to step away from their way of working to ‘proper’ Scrum. Examples:
• They keep on having analysis, design, code, test sprint
• They aren’t aiming to slice stories further when they are considered too big (for a sprint)
• They only do 3 daily sprints per week and fail to see why a daily sprint should really be daily.
• Some teams have a Scrum Master acting as a team lead or a project manager. This remained like this after the transition.

There is still a lot of guidance required from the Agile coaches. Right now I am not too sure what would happen when they leave. Would we fall back into old habits? The very good thing is that management is continuing the act as servant leaders. This fact, combined with the clear productivity and quality improvements since the transition, make me optimistic.

Originally published at ageling.wordpress.com on November 3, 2017.