Why isn’t my Agile working? Top level buy in

Agile_Ed
Agile_Ed
Sep 3, 2018 · 4 min read

Previously I’ve posted about why your Agile (specifically Scrum / sprints) might not be working and what you can do to try and fix it. In this post I’ll look at the other big reason it may not be working, and it’s the hardest one to deal with — top level buy in.

A Simple Fact

When I say “top level” buy in, I mean the top of the organisation — the absolute top. There is a lot of information out there on this, but the common theme that runs through most Agile implementations / transformation failures is:

If you don’t have buy in from, or the motivation to move to agile isn’t coming from the very top of your organisation, then it just won’t work.

By “won’t work” I mean that the organisation won’t get the benefits that it wants from whatever flavour of Agile it is trying to implement or transform to, because without motivation / help from the very top then eventually you’ll hit dependencies or blockers that you simply can’t resolve. For example:

  • You’re in a very large organisation and you are trying to mange / affect things (e.g. dependencies) in other departments that are outside of your direct control.
  • Another function within the organisation (e.g. HR, finance) is not part of your transformation. You can safely bet that they will not have aligned tasks (to recruit staff, gain budget) to help you when you need it.
  • Other areas are afraid of the change and the impact it will have on them (as they have not been part of your transformation process and may have no knowledge of the subject) and so may be reluctant to help what they see as an experiment.
  • Other areas do not want to adapt as it might overly change their structure, governance, funding model, annual budget, reduce the “empire”, and so on.

These are just a few examples that you might encounter, and it’s easy to see why they may be impossible to fix without someone at the top of the organisation who is pushing the overall change through.

Communication

Another interesting point here is communication, and again it relates to that top level buy in.

If there is buy in from the top level senior management then that message should be clearly communicated to everyone in the organisation, so that everyone has aligned goals and priorities. Again this covers many areas which are too detailed to elaborate on in this post, but you want to be clear on:

  • The goal of the transformation
  • Why it is being done
  • How different people / teams / areas / functions will be aligned
  • How the transition will work
  • How peoples roles will be affected
  • What the high level priorities are that everyone should be working for.

Again this list is hardly exhaustive, but you get the idea.

As an example of why this is so important, imagine being part of a department that is (according to leadership) doing Agile, but during a discussion on TDD with a leading industry expert someone says “but my manager won’t let me do TDD, they see it as a waste of time”. This clearly shows that whatever the leadership thinks is happening, the message on the ground is very different. And yes, that did happen.

Fully Transforming

You can’t successfully and fully realise all the benefits of transforming to “Agile” if only a part of the organisation does so, it must be the whole organisation.

This includes senior management planning, budgeting, recruitment, HR, legal, absolutely everyone. Because if they don’t then not everyone will be able to respond to the highest or changing priorities, and the process will fail. If this sounds idealistic there are companies that have achieved this — Bosch have transformed to an Agile approach and they have ~400,000 employees worldwide. Even the board now works in sprints.

Companies like this change everything about themselves. They now run through their budgeting / finance allocation process far more regularly than once a year, which enables them to pick up on and invest in new demands from the market, or quickly move away from things that are now less profitable. If annual financial planning still sounds like it makes more sense let me put it another way — why would you plan your companies financial allocations (from market based priorities) based on the amount of time it takes the earth to orbit the sun?

Summary

If you think this sounds overly simplistic and obvious, I know, it does. So please do your own research and see what you find.

When you find that this is indeed the case, it really starts to highlight how fundamentally important this buy in is. Without it you’ll do your best, you might get a certain way, but it won’t take hold and last. I say this with confidence because I was at an Agile meetup recently where I heard someone proudly saying that they were implementing Scrum in their department within their (very large) organisation, “we’ve brought in an Agile Coach in and everything”. They were very happy about this and excited for what it would bring. Only thing is that I too had worked at that organisation, also in a department that went through a Scrum transformation — 10 years previously.

Changes often don’t take hold as easily as you’d hope.

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