Agile is transforming people, not organization
Around one month ago, I was contacted by a colleague of Lima office, to get support on a Lean Kanban transformation for the creation of automation robots for a client in the financial industry, for a short project of 5 weeks, where they needed to create a Center of Excellence based on agile. I didn’t take it very seriously at the beginning, Besides that looked interesting, it was not feasible for my actual workload. But this joined to others things going on, and I had the chance to go work on the opportunity, the adventure of an agile transformation started, again.
I worked directly in the client office, one of the biggest banks of Peru, and I should say one of the coolest environments I have ever worked. There were funny, interesting and crazy things going on… A good way to summarize was the first Friday I stay there. It was around 4 PM, and a big group of around 50 people was walking and singing loudly a popular song with customized lyrics about the company… looked like the ’30 IBM empire. Sometime after that, I was told that those people participated in an immersion week about transforming the culture, and the singing was one of the results of that activity.
One day, there were dogs in the office, the following one, there were nuns… I have actually invited to a company talent show, where some of the guys I was working made a Salsa Dance (“invited” is not fully accurate, but let’s leave it there).
So the environment of work was really cool. There were post-its everywhere, tables that you can write, and very good energy to make agile things happened, but only from people’s side, for the working side… not yet there.
After the first working session, I get the idea of what was the origin, and the problem to be solved with the Agile Transformation for the CoE. We decided to make a merge between different frameworks to merge workshops, kanban, and scrum into a complete end to end project.
We moved some pieces and started to put hands on it. Then the classical transformation issues started…. vendors restriction, people reporting to the old leads no to their team, leadership challenging with: “That will not work for our situation, we are used to do the things in our own way…”
One of the key points of the new framework was to enable people to focus on a particular stage of the development and avoid switching between new documents, development, support. And the way to change it was the maintain the focus: If you will work creating documents, just do that. Once the document is completed. Give to someone more that will take it from that point to the next stage.
Basically, you don’t own a full implementation, you own a part of the flow, trust that everybody will do their job.
One of the most intense moments during my stay in Peru was when we presented the model to the whole team. They get shocked. Make a lot of questions and they honestly doubt that it will work: I should transfer my knowledge? How I know the other guy will get it done right? No one will be responsible for anything! No, everybody will be responsible for all. From my humble point of view, this was agility at a full house.
One of the most lovely moments was when 10 days later, we show them some of the pilots that we were running, and they realized: Oh… so it could actually work…. it looks better now I see it…
So it’s not environment or workplace what makes you be agile, it’s people doing it, what makes the change.
